The ongoing weird project around visiting old Columbia River Highway mileposts is now up to mile 32, which just so happens to be right at Multnomah Falls. Or, strictly speaking, right around the west end of the Multnomah Falls Lodge parking lot, which is a short distance west of the actual falls. If you're driving along on the old highway during tourist season you'll be stuck in traffic for a good long while here and will have plenty of time to contemplate the milepost out your passenger side window. You'll also get a good look at the East and West Viaducts and the Multnomah Creek Bridge if you're interested in that sort of thing, or if you just need something to distract a car full of screamy kids or cantankerous oldsters while you sit in traffic.
If inching past at 2mph isn't your idea of a good time, you have a few options. The most popular is to park in the large lot along I-84, which (during the summer tourist season) now requires a reservation up to 14 days in advance, and costs $2, and even then there may not be any parking available. (Or you could just show up after 6pm, which is actually the best time to go, but don't tell anybody that.) Or you can park in the tiny, congested lot on the old highway across from the lodge, which will now cost you a whopping $20, on the off-chance a space opens up. Or you could try parking back at Wahkeena Falls or in the Oneonta - Horsetail area and hike from there; those don't cost anything (yet) but the lots are often full by mid-morning. There's usually parking at Benson State Park, across the railroad tracks from Wahkeena Falls, but it's $10 to park, and there are no official trails between there and the outside world so you'll have to bushwhack a bit. You could even park up top at Sherrard Point and hike down from there, though it's $5 to park, and a 14 mile roundtrip, and the return trip is uphill the whole way. If you'd rather not drive, period, the Columbia Gorge Express bus (run by the Hood River County bus system) will set you back $10, or $40 for an annual pass. Union Pacific trains pass through here frequently at high speed, but this line hasn't carried passengers at all since the late 1990s, and stopping at Multnomah Falls was discontinued sometime between 1920 and 1950, and the trains go by fast enough that riding the rails hobo-style is probably not a safe option here. Or you could go by bike; this involves riding in traffic on the (hilly) old highway, so it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but at least nobody's charging for bike parking yet (as of July 2025). Unfortunately, getting really, really good at going by bike may involve a few clandestine trips to the back alleys of Eastern Europe to visit doctors with active Interpol warrants, and that gets expensive rather quickly.
That's a whole lot of trouble to go to just to look at a concrete post with a "32" on it, so you might as well look at the falls too while you're here. Maybe hit the Larch Mountain Trail and visit the five additional waterfalls further upstream (Little Multnomah, Dutchman, Wiesendanger, Ecola, and Upper Multnomah). Wiesendanger is probably the most photogenic of the bunch, and you especially don't want to miss Ecola Falls, the very spot where harpoon-wielding sasquatches once hunted the legendary Larch Mountain beaked whale (allegedly).
Keen-eyed readers might have noticed that I didn't say anything about getting here by boat. River cruise ships do exist along the Columbia, but they don't stop anywhere near here. There isn't a pier to dock at, for one thing, and then no way for tourists to get across I-84 except for waiting for a gap in traffic and then running across, which I can't recommend, and the gift shop at the lodge isn't set up for that many tourists descending on it all at once. Those problems are all solveable, but there would still be Fashion Reef to contend with. The name sounds like a tiki bar, or the overpriced tropical t-shirt shop next door to the tiki bar, but no. As an April 1949 Oregonian story explains, it's an awkwardly placed rock out in the river, and got its name from a longstanding nautical tradition: If a ship -- in this case an early 1850s river steamboat named Fashion -- er, "discovers" a new maritime hazard by smashing into it, they name the rock after the ship. Or the sandbar, as with Astoria's Desdemona Sands. This is obviously one of the lesser forms of immortality out there, though I suppose maybe you name your ship after yourself and then crash it into an unnamed rock, and be sure it looks like an accident. On the other hand, there were plenty of other steamboats plying their trade on the river in those days, nearly all of them of the non-collidey, non-sinky persuasion, and I can't recall the name of a single one of them off the top of my head. Draw valuable general-purpose life lessons from this at your peril.
