The Historic Columbia River Highway: Troutdale to The Dalles

The Route at a Glance

The old road leaves Troutdale across the Sandy River, follows its east bank upstream, then climbs through farm country to Crown Point. Vista House stands on the point, an octagonal stone rest stop finished in 1918 as a memorial to the Oregon pioneers, 733 feet above the Columbia, and the road circles it. From there Samuel Lancaster's highway drops in tight, stone-walled curves into the waterfall corridor — Latourell, Bridal Veil, Wahkeena, and Multnomah, which falls 620 feet in two drops with the Benson footbridge of 1914 between them. The road is narrow and the lots at Multnomah fill early on summer days; a weekday morning is better, and the falls run fuller outside summer anyway.

Past Ainsworth the old road merges into Interstate 84, and for some thirty-five miles the freeway is the only way through by car: past Bonneville Dam, finished in 1938, then Cascade Locks and Hood River. Between Hood River and Mosier the original roadway survives as a state trail closed to cars, through the Mosier Twin Tunnels.

At Mosier the old highway comes back as a road and climbs out of the forest onto open grassland high above the river. At Rowena Crest it drops down the basalt in a stack of hairpin loops, and in spring the Tom McCall Preserve on the crest goes yellow and blue with balsamroot and lupine. From the foot of the loops it runs on into The Dalles, where the Gorge opens into dry country and the wagon road west used to meet the river.

The Drive, Stop by Stop

4 stops along the route, in driving order from Troutdale, Oregon to The Dalles, Oregon.

1. 1

   Vista House at Crown Point

   Corbett

   A rest stop on a basalt point 733 feet above the Columbia, budgeted at $12,000, finished for about $100,000, and mocked for years as Oregon's most expensive outhouse.

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2. 2

   Multnomah Falls

   Corbett

   A 620-foot double waterfall whose 1925 stone lodge survived because firefighters kept it soaked while the forest burned around it in September 2017.

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3. 3

   Bonneville Dam

   Cascade Locks

   The first federal dam on the Columbia, where someone has counted the fish climbing its ladders every year since 1938, beside an island the Corps used as a dump for forty years.

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4. 4

   Rowena Crest and the Tom McCall Preserve

   Mosier

   A crest where the Ice Age floods jammed against a basalt promontory, above a plateau of mounds no one has fully explained, and a few in the parking loop that the highway department built.

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That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let The Historic Columbia River Highway: Troutdale to The Dalles do what it does best.