Hanford Reach National Monument

Hanford Reach National Monument covers over 196,000 acres of arid eastern Washington. President Clinton proclaimed it in 2000 under the Antiquities Act. It was the first national monument managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The monument includes 46.5 miles of the 51-mile Hanford Reach of the Columbia River, fall Chinook spawning areas, and sturgeon water.

In 1943 the Army Corps of Engineers chose this basin, between Rattlesnake Mountain and the Saddle Mountains, for secret plutonium production. Large tracts around the reactors stayed as safety and security buffers and were left largely undisturbed. Those buffers preserved shrub-steppe, cultural sites, and a river reach that FWS calls an eligible wild and scenic river.

The proclamation lists loggerhead shrikes, sage sparrows, sage thrashers, and ferruginous hawks; rare plants including Umtanum desert buckwheat and White Bluffs bladderpod; the White Bluffs and Hanford Dune Field; and more than 10,000 years of human occupation. Visitors may currently access over 57,000 acres. The sources below are the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service monument pages.