Multnomah Falls

Multnomah Falls drops six hundred twenty feet in two tiers from the basalt cliffs of the Columbia River Gorge, making it the tallest waterfall in Oregon and one of the tallest year-round waterfalls in the entire United States. The water appears, almost impossibly, out of the cliff face itself, fed by underground springs from Larch Mountain above rather than by a visible surface stream. Even in the driest summer months, the falls never stops.

The falls take their name from the Multnomah, a band of Chinookan people who lived along the south shore of the Columbia. Their villages occupied the riverbanks here for thousands of years before European contact. The falls appear in Multnomah oral tradition as a sacred site, and a popular nineteenth-century legend, almost certainly invented by a white writer rather than drawn from actual Multnomah tradition, tells of a princess who leaped from the cliff to appease spirits during a plague. The falls had their own significance long before that story was attached to them.

When Samuel Lancaster began designing the Historic Columbia River Highway in nineteen thirteen, he made Multnomah Falls the centerpiece of the route. Lancaster was an idealist who believed roads should enhance scenery rather than destroy it. He routed the highway along the cliff faces with sweeping curves, built stone retaining walls to blend with the basalt, and insisted that the Multnomah Falls Lodge be sited directly at the base of the falls.

The lodge was completed in nineteen twenty-five, built from river rock and Cascade timber. A footbridge arcs across the lower falls, placing visitors inside the spray. The path continues steeply to a viewpoint at the top of the upper tier, where hikers look out over the Columbia from more than seven hundred feet above the river.

Today Multnomah Falls draws roughly two million visitors per year, making it the most visited natural recreation site in the Pacific Northwest. The highway you drove to reach it is itself a National Historic Landmark.