Willamette Falls

The Willamette pours over a horseshoe-shaped basalt ledge some fifteen hundred feet across here, a drop of about thirty-five feet, and for thousands of years the falls were a fishery and a meeting place. The Clackamas and the Clowewalla lived at them, and Wasco, Multnomah, Yakama, Tualatin and Molala people came to trade for dried salmon and to ask for fishing rights. The last Clackamas at the falls were removed to the Grand Ronde reservation in 1856.

Every summer Pacific lamprey, the eel-like fish that are a first food for the river's tribes, gather at the base of the falls on their way upstream; settlers in the late 1800s described the rock as carpeted with them, in places three deep. Their numbers have collapsed across the Columbia basin, and this is one of the last places where tribal members still gather them by hand from the wet rocks. The Yakama, Umatilla, Warm Springs and Nez Perce hold treaty rights to fish here, and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde harvest under an agreement with the state. Commercial lamprey harvest at the falls ended in 2002, and the tribes lead the work to bring the runs back.

The industrial century sits beside them. Locks opened on the west side in 1873 to lift steamboats past the falls and closed for lack of repair money in 2011; woolen and paper mills lined both banks, and an electric plant began generating here in 1888. The falls themselves are closed to the public. The best view is from the viewpoint above the river on the West Linn side, off I-205; the Grand Ronde tribe, which now owns the old mill site on the Oregon City bank, calls the falls by their own name, tumwata.