Pacific Northwest Images

Silver Falls City was an early center for logging and some fairly unsuccessful homestead farming. Future US President Herbert Hoover surveyed some of the land there while serving as a young engineer.

After that, the private owner of South Falls charged admission to let people watch as he floated derelict cars over the falls. In 1928 a paying audience watched daredevil Al Faussett canoe over 177-fout South Falls. He had to spend months afterward in a hospital, recovering from his injuries.

In 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that Silver Falls would be one of his largest Recreational Demonstration Projects. He bought private land and employed young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps to develop park facilities. Since then the forest has regrown so that most visitors do not even notice that the area was once logged.

All waterfalls in the park spill over 15-million-year-old Columbia River basalt. At that time the Columbia River flowed through this area to the sea at what is now Newport. Repeated lava flows poured down the river channel from vents in Eastern Oregon, gradually pushing the river northward. As the lava slowly cooled, it sometimes fractured to form the honeycomb of columns visible on cliff edges. Circular indentations in the ceilings of the misty caverns behind the falls are tree wells, formed when the lava flows hardened around burning trees. The churning of Silver Creek gouged the soft soil from beneath the harder lava, leaving these caverns and casts.