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| Photo courtesy North Lincoln County Historical Society. |
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The World's Shortest River
is Long on Controversy
By Niki Price
Oregon Coast Today
Is Lincoln City’s D River really the World’s Shortest? The short answer: Yes and no. For the long explanation, one filled with mystery, Mother Nature and a little murky marketing, read on.
The D is most certainly tiny. It quickly funnels the water from freshwater Devils Lake, a shallow recreational body fed by several streams, to the great Pacific Ocean. It flows under an unremarkable concrete bridge toward a popular restaurant called Kyllo’s. Even at its mightiest, now through late spring, it’s about 30 feet wide and no more than 3 feet deep.
But, to the people of Lincoln City, the D River is a big deal. For one thing, all the addresses in this long, skinny town are oriented to its location. Those who lose their way find a simple solution: find Hwy. 101 or the river, and navigate from there.
In addition, the D’s southwestern bank is home to Lincoln City’s busiest state park, and the scenic arena for its annual kite festivals: the D River State Recreation Site. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people visit this beachfront parking lot to walk on the beach, feed the gulls, use the restrooms or watch the kites flying overhead. And, just about every day, you can see a few of those visitors pose for photographs in front of the green-and-white Oregon Department of Transportation sign that proclaims: “D River — World’s Shortest.”
They’ve been posing there since the 1930s, when the new Roosevelt Highway brought the first big waves of automobile travelers crashing through the central coast. That roadway, later renamed Hwy. 101, went through the city of Delake and crossed over a river known by locals as “the mouth of Devils Lake,” “the channel to Devils Lake,” Devil’s Creek, Delake Creek and, most frequently, “the outlet.” In 1940, the Delake Chamber of Commerce sponsored a nationwide contest to come up with a new, shorter name for the world’s shortest river.
The winning moniker, “D,” a perfectly succinct name submitted by Mrs. Johanna Beard of Albany, Ore., was officially accepted by the U.S. Geographic Board of Names.
The resulting publicity garnered the first challenge to Delake’s boast. The Klamath County Chamber of Commerce protested that Delake’s “river” was really no more than a brook, and that their Lunk River, which flows 8,000 feet between Klamath Lake and Lake Ewauna, was actually the world’s shortest. Despite Klamath’s claim, the Geodetic-Geographic Board in Washington D.C., agreed that the D River held the title based on its official length of 440 feet at low tide. The D was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the World’s Shortest River. ODOT put up the signs, and the legend began. When Delake was incorporated into Lincoln City in 1965, the D River came with it.
“Just like Depoe Bay, which has the world’s smallest year-round navigable harbor, we have the shortest river in the world. It’s part of our image, and the charm of the area,” said Roger Robertson, who has been a promoter of Lincoln City ever since he moved here in the 1970s. “It’s something we’ve got that nobody else has.”
Roe hatches a controversy
A gang of rowdy 10-year-olds begged to disagree. In 1987, the fifth-grade class of Lincoln Elementary School in Great Falls, Mont., began to petition the Guinness Book adjudication office to consider their own Roe River for the record. The Roe, which flows from the freshwater Giant Springs to the Missouri River, takes its name from the state trout fishery nearby. Coming in at an average of 201 feet, the Roe was poised to D-liver Lincoln City’s river a crushing D-feat. Television and newspaper reporters picked up on the children’s crusade, which eventually made its way to the highest court of opinion in the land: “The Tonight Show.”
“That’s how D battle of D River began,” said Robertson. “D Navy D-clared war.”
All in good fun, of course, but many in Lincoln City took the loss of their bragging rights to heart. Dave Gomberg, who was hired as the director of the Lincoln City Chamber of Commerce in 1989, considered regaining the title a top priority.
“A group of school kids in Great Falls basically went out and got a drainage ditch surveyed for a school project,” Gomberg said. “And they got the U.S. Survey of Geographical Names to go along with it. The city fathers and mothers here thought that just wasn’t right.”
Gomberg obtained an official length study, conducted in 1988 by civil engineer Gene T. Ginther, which found that the D River was actually 120 feet long, give or take 5 feet. While this study may not have been completely impartial, having been paid for by the Devils Lake Water Improvement District and conducted by an engineer whose office was located on West Devils Lake Road, it was valid enough for the Guinness Book to re-open the case.
In the summer of 1990, Gomberg held a press conference on the banks of the mighty D. He donned his boots, walked out into the river near the Hwy. 101 bridge, and told the assembled members of the press (including three television crews from Portland), that he was standing in the World’s Shortest River once again. The Guinness Book officials had decided to let the Roe and the D share the title. Fortunately, all the signs could remain.
How did they shrink the D River, from the original 440 feet to 120 feet with a 5 foot variable? It’s all about the criteria, and whose to use.
The original length was measured from an unknown spot on the east side of the Hwy. 101 bridge to the low tide line, which is no doubt west of the sea wall, on the beach. The engineer Ginther decided to begin around the same place, the old fish control structure about 20 feet east of the bridge, but stop much further east, above the line of “extreme high tide.” This point, where the tide ceases to be a “regularly influencing element,” is parallel to the current location of the informational kiosk in the D River State Recreational Site parking lot. The exact points of reference may be hard to find, but one thing is clear: most of the World’s Shortest River is obscured by the highway that has helped to make it famous.
At the press conference in 1990, Gomberg recalled, the reporters were a little dubious. He remembers one of them pointed downstream, west of the wading chamber director, and asked, “If you’re standing at the end of the river, then what is all that wet stuff on the beach?”
“I said, ‘That’s the D River Estuary,’ which is true, really, because you can’t really call it a bay. Maybe it’s the D River tidal plain,” he said.
In the end, the Guinness Book of World Records tried to make both communities happy by creating a dual title. The fluctuating D River held the title most of the time, the listing demurred, but the Roe was the shortest, consistently.
Twenty years after D Battle, both Lincoln City and Great Falls are still claiming the title. There’s no one to stop them, either, because the Guinness Book of World Records no longer has a category for “World’s Shortest River.” |
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