U.S. Department of Transportation / public domain via Wikimedia Commons
A 4-Day Itinerary
The Gorge, Mount Hood and the Coast in 4 Days
From Portland up the Columbia and back down to the Pacific: a highway laid out to arrive at views, a village that stayed, a WPA lodge on a volcano, a town the river took, and a lighthouse on a finger of old lava.
4 days · 425 miles · best in spring & summer & fall
Portland, OR → Newport, OR
Most people meet northern Oregon in pieces: a waterfall on a day trip, a weekend on the mountain, a weekend at the beach. This trip strings the pieces into one four-day loop out of Portland. It runs up the Columbia on a highway its engineer laid out to climb from view to view, out past the rain line to where the Gorge turns to grassland and a dam drowned one of the great fishing places on the continent, and around Mount Hood to a lodge that relief crews raised in the Depression. Then it comes back down to the Willamette, where settlers voted a government into being on a meadow the river later scoured clean, and crosses the Coast Range to finish on the central coast at Newport.
1
Day 1
The Old Highway to Hood River
70 mi · about 2 hrs driving · overnight in Hood River
Leave the interstate at Troutdale for the Historic Columbia River Highway, the road Samuel Lancaster laid out in the 1910s to climb from one viewpoint to the next. The first is the biggest: Vista House on Crown Point, 733 feet over the river, where the highway was dedicated in 1916 and loops right around the building. Drop into the waterfall corridor to Multnomah Falls, 620 feet in two drops, and walk up to Simon Benson's 1914 footbridge. Rejoin I-84 to Bonneville Dam, whose reservoir put the Cascade Rapids under water in 1938, and with them some thirty-seven tribal fishing sites. Sleep in Hood River.
2
Day 2
Rowena, Celilo and the Mountain
120 mi · about 3 hrs driving · overnight in Government Camp
East of Hood River the rain gives out. Take the old highway again from Mosier to Rowena Crest, where the road drops off the plateau in a stack of hairpins and the grassland turns yellow and blue with balsamroot and lupine from March into May. Go on by I-84 to Celilo. Look from the riverside park at the exit, where the reservoir lies over Celilo Falls, and leave Celilo Village and its longhouse to the families who live there. Then double back to Hood River and climb OR-35 up the valley and around the east side of Mount Hood to Timberline Lodge, built by WPA relief crews between 1936 and 1938. Its public rooms are open to anyone. Sleep at the lodge or down the hill in Government Camp.
3
Day 3
Down to the Willamette
125 mi · about 3.5 hrs driving · overnight in Silverton
Come off the mountain on US-26 to Oregon City. Visits to the McLoughlin House, home of the fur-company man who fed and lent to the settlers his employers wanted kept out, start at the Barclay House next door. The falls he settled beside are closed to the public, so see Willamette Falls, tumwata to the Grand Ronde, from the viewpoint on the West Linn side off I-205. Head south to Champoeg, where settlers voted to organize a provisional government in May 1843 and the December 1861 flood carried the town away. End at Silver Falls State Park and take the short walk down and behind South Falls. Sleep in Silverton.
4
Day 4
Over the Coast Range to Newport
110 mi · about 3 hrs driving · overnight in Newport
Cross the valley and the Coast Range on OR-22 and OR-18 and turn south on US-101 at Lincoln City. Depoe Bay takes its name from a Tututni man, known at the Siletz Agency as Depot Charley, who was allotted land beside its small harbor in 1894. Gray whales feed close enough to see from the seawall, best from late summer into fall, and the state parks whale watching center at the north end of the bridge has binoculars and someone who knows where to look. Finish at Yaquina Head, where Oregon's tallest lighthouse has worked since 1873 and murres crowd Colony Rock from April into summer. Newport is a few miles south.
The drives this trip follows
Each one is traced end to end on its own page, with every stop worth making along the way.
