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Vantage, Washington

Undated photograph of Vantage. Vantage was the site of a ferry, which operated from 1914 to 1927, that carried vehicles across the Columbia River. The town moved for the first time when a bridge was built across the river in 1927, and relocated again in the 1960s, before Wanapum Dam inundated the area. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, workers building the Vantage Road, geologist George F. Beck, and his students uncovered fossilized wood, including the very first petrified ginkgo specimens, in and around Vantage. The area was also home to centuries-old, Wánapam petroglyphs, which were carved into nearby basalt cliffs. Sixty of the three hundred petroglyph figures were removed before the cliffs were submerged by Wanapum Dam, and are now on display in Vantage's Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park.