21 & Over | The Gorge Amphitheatre — Three months later, above the Columbia

The film ends where it has to end: not on campus, but out in the desert, three months on, with the three of them back together at a music festival. That festival is real, and so is the ground it stands on.

The Gorge Amphitheatre sits on a bluff outside George, Washington, about two and a half hours east of Seattle across the Cascades. The grass slope runs down towards a stage, and behind the stage there is nothing built at all — just the Columbia River in a basalt canyon carved by ice-age floods, and then miles of open country. It holds around twenty-seven thousand people. It began in 1986 as a small amphitheatre at a winery, and grew because performers kept saying it was the most beautiful place they had ever played.

Getting to Seattle's campus from here takes half a day. That distance is the point of the closing scene. The characters have to leave the university entirely before they can be honest with each other.

Camp overnight if you go, because everyone does and there is nowhere else to stay. Walk to the top of the lawn at about eight in the evening in summer, when the sun drops behind the far rim and the canyon walls go orange, and the band is still tuning. That view is the last thing the film shows you, and it is not exaggerated.