Multnomah Falls: Oregon's Tallest Drop

The waterfall you are approaching has been falling for thousands of years, fed by underground springs and snowmelt from Larch Mountain above the Columbia River Gorge. Multnomah Falls drops six hundred twenty feet in two tiers, making it the tallest waterfall in Oregon and one of the highest year-round waterfalls in the United States. The upper tier alone falls five hundred forty-two feet before the water pauses at a pool, then spills down another sixty-nine feet past the stone bridge that spans the canyon.

That bridge, the Benson Bridge, was built in nineteen fourteen by Italian stonemasons and carries visitors to a viewpoint where the mist reaches them in a fine, cold spray. The bridge and the falls are named for Simon Benson, a Norwegian-born timber magnate who became one of Portland's most prominent philanthropists. Benson purchased the land surrounding the falls to prevent commercial development and then donated approximately fourteen hundred acres, including Multnomah and Wahkeena Falls, to the city of Portland in September of nineteen fifteen.

The donation came at precisely the right moment. The Historic Columbia River Highway was then under construction, and it would pass directly by the falls the following year. Benson was a major backer of that highway project, and the combination of a public park and a scenic road turned Multnomah Falls into one of the most visited natural sites on the West Coast.

The lodge at the base of the falls was completed in nineteen twenty-five, designed by Portland architect A. E. Doyle in what came to be called Cascadian style, using split fieldstone quarried from the gorge. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-one.

Today, around two million people visit each year. Most of them stand on the Benson Bridge and look up at a curtain of white water that has never stopped falling.