I’ve driven the Historic Columbia River Highway more times than I can count, and every single time I round that first bend past Troutdale, I feel like I’m falling backward through geologic time.
The thing about the Columbia River Gorge—this massive slash through the Cascade Range separating Washington and Oregon—is that it’s basically a textbook written in basalt and mist. The highway itself, built between 1913 and 1922, was engineered by Samuel Lancaster, who wanted drivers to experience “poetry in motion,” which sounds absurdly romantic until you actually drive it and realize he wasn’t exaggerating. The route hugs cliff faces, threads through moss-draped forests, and delivers you to waterfall after waterfall—more than 70 of them within the gorge, though only a handful are easily accessible from the road. Multnomah Falls, the second-tallest year-round waterfall in the United States at 620 feet, draws something like two million visitors annually, which means you’re never really alone there, but honestly, standing at the base while that column of water crashes down, you kind of forget about the crowds anyway. The geology here is a layered story of volcanic eruptions spanning roughly 17 million years, give or take, with the most dramatic chapter written by the Missoula Floods—cataclysmic deluges that ripped through this landscape between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago when ice dams repeatedly failed in what’s now Montana.
Wait—maybe I should back up. The Historic Highway isn’t just one continuous road anymore. Parts of it were bypassed when Interstate 84 was built in the 1950s and 60s, and then the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire scorched over 48,000 acres, closing sections for years. Some portions reopened, others remain restricted, and the result is this patchwork experience where you’re switching between the original scenic route and the faster freeway, which feels like toggling between two different centuries.
When Ancient Ice Dams Break and Redesign Everything Downstream
Here’s the thing about the Missoula Floods: they weren’t a single event but a series—maybe 40, maybe 100, nobody knows exactly—of apocalyptic torrents that carved the gorge into its current form. Glacial Lake Missoula, an ice-dammed lake holding roughly 500 cubic miles of water, would periodically burst through its ice barrier and send walls of water up to 400 feet high roaring westward at speeds that make modern floods look like leaky faucets. The water carried icebergs the size of buildings, scoured bedrock, and deposited erratic boulders that still confuse hikers today. Geologist J Harlen Bretz proposed this catastrophic flood theory in the 1920s and was basically ridiculed by the scientific establishment for decades—turns out he was right, but academia doesn’t always reward being correct too early.
I used to think waterfalls were just pretty accidents of topography, but they’re actually narrative markers. Latourell Falls, one of the first you encounter heading east, plunges 249 feet over a columnar basalt amphitheater that looks almost architectural, like someone designed it. Horsetail Falls lives up to its name—a slender 176-foot drop that you can literally walk behind if you take the short trail to Ponytail Falls (yes, different fall, confusing naming convention). Wahkeena Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, Shepperd’s Dell—each one represents a slightly different chapter in how water and rock negotiate their relationship over millennia.
What Samuel Lancaster’s Engineering Romanticism Actually Built Into These Cliffs
Lancaster was obsessed with European alpine roads, and he wanted the Columbia River Highway to be more than transportation—he wanted it to be an experience, a destination in itself. The Benson Bridge at Multnomah Falls, built in 1914, was deliberately placed to give visitors that perfect mid-cascade viewpoint. The stone guardrails, the carefully graded curves designed so drivers wouldn’t exceed 25 miles per hour, the vista points positioned at moments of maximum drama—it was all intentional theater. And it worked, maybe too well, because by mid-century the road couldn’t handle modern traffic volumes and got partially replaced by the interstate, which is efficient but decidedly unpoetic.
The Eagle Creek Fire changed things in ways we’re still processing. It started on September 2, 2017, when a teenager threw fireworks into the tinder-dry canyon—spectacularly stupid timing given the drought conditions—and within days it had consumed old-growth forest and closed the gorge to recreation. Some trails have reopened, others remain closed for safety or restoration, and the landscape now carries these burn scars that will take decades to fully heal. I guess it’s a reminder that these places aren’t static museums but living systems that occasionally recieve catastrophic resets, whether from ice-age floods or contemporary wildfires.
Anyway, if you drive it now, you’re seeing a palimpsest: Lancaster’s century-old vision, the interstate’s mid-century pragmatism, the flood’s prehistoric violence, and the fire’s recent rewrite all layered together. It’s messy and incomplete and definately worth the trip.
