Maybe you seek a claim to fame — something you can brag about at all those cocktail parties you attend. A good claim to fame might be to walk from the beginning to the end of a river. Now that would be quite an accomplishment on most rivers. For example, to travel from one end of the Colorado River to the other would be 1,450 miles.
Given that, maybe you’d prefer something more manageable. In that case, you might opt for the D River, which is 440 feet long and begins and ends in Lincoln City, Oregon. It flows from Devils Lake under U.S. 101 into the Pacific Ocean. The D River was once listed as the “shortest river in the world,” by the Guinness Book of World Records. Then, in 1989, Guinness said the Roe River in Montana was even shorter. Well, the Lincoln City people were not about to accept being second, so they re-measured it at “extreme high tide,” and claimed once again that their river was shorter.
Guinness must have been confused because after that it no longer listed a category for shortest river. But as you can see in this sign by U.S. 101, Lincoln City still insists its river is the shortest.
