The Most Beautiful Waterfalls in the United States
13 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful waterfalls in the United States are Yosemite Falls, Multnomah Falls and McWay Falls. The list covers 13 waterfalls. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The United States holds almost every kind of waterfall geology can make. Glaciers carved the granite of the Sierra Nevada into valleys with streams hanging above them; lava floods built the basalt plateaus of the Pacific Northwest and the Snake River Plain, where rivers cut sheer gorges; the old sandstone of the Appalachians forms broad ledges; and on the volcanic slopes of Hawaii, trade-wind rain feeds falls that drop through rainforest.
Yosemite Falls drops about 739 metres in three sections, and in February the low sun can turn the thin stream of Horsetail Fall on El Capitan an incandescent orange. Multnomah Falls in the Columbia River Gorge falls in two tiers with a stone footbridge between them, and McWay Falls on the Big Sur coast lands on a beach beside the Pacific.
Shoshone Falls on the Snake River in Idaho is taller than Niagara, and Palouse Falls in Washington plunges into a basalt canyon cut by Ice Age floods. Burney Falls in California is fed largely by springs flowing out of porous volcanic rock, so it runs strongly all year. In Kentucky, Cumberland Falls is known for its moonbow, and on the Island of Hawaii, Akaka Falls drops about 135 metres into a gorge of tropical forest.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yosemite Falls | Waterfall | |
| 2 | Multnomah Falls | Waterfall | |
| 3 | McWay Falls | Waterfall | |
| 4 | Shoshone Falls | Waterfall | |
| 5 | Dry Falls, Washington | Waterfall | |
| 6 | Eternal Flame Falls | Waterfall | |
| 7 | Havasu Falls | Waterfall | |
| 8 | Cumberland Falls | Waterfall | |
| 9 | Horsetail Fall | Waterfall | |
| 10 | Palouse Falls | Waterfall | |
| 11 | Burney Falls | Waterfall | |
| 12 | Akaka Falls State Park | Waterfall | |
| 13 | Toketee Falls | Waterfall |
01 Yosemite Falls
United States37.755° N 119.597° W
Mike McBey · CC BY 2.0 The Ahwahneechee people who lived in the valley called the fall Cholock, and held that the pool at its base was haunted by spirits known as the Poloti. Today two very different walks lead to it. A short, easy path from near Yosemite Valley Lodge ends at a bridge below the Lower Fall. The trail to the top of the Upper Fall is a different matter, about three and a half miles each way, steep and strenuous, taking most walkers between two and four hours to climb, with views down the fall and across the valley.
Did you know? In cold spring weather the falls can produce frazil ice, a slush of frozen mist crystals that creeps down Yosemite Creek like a slow-moving flood.
02 Multnomah Falls
United States45.576° N 122.115° W
Thank You (25 Millions ) views · CC BY 4.0 The site's more recent history is less mythic and more sobering: the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire burned through the forest surrounding the falls, closing the area for well over a year.
Did you know? The falls formed roughly 15,000 years ago, when the Ice Age Missoula Floods scoured the gorge and left Multnomah Creek in a hanging valley.
03 McWay Falls
United States36.159° N 121.672° W
Image by dianes_sunshine from Pixabay The land above the fall has its own story. In 1924 Congressman Lathrop Brown and his wife Hélène bought the Saddle Rock Ranch, a property of about 1,600 acres, from the homesteader Christopher McWay. They later built a modern two-storey Waterfall House on the headland, and a Pelton wheel installed on the creek in 1932 generated electricity for the property. In 1961 Hélène Brown gave the land to the state on condition that it be named after Julia Pfeiffer Burns, a woman of the early Big Sur coast; the park still carries that name.
Did you know? Its 32-volt generator powered three houses, a blacksmith's shop and a small funicular railway on the ranch.
04 Shoshone Falls
United States · 6.2 km from Twin Falls42.595° N 114.401° W
Image by josephhill from Pixabay The 20th century changed the falls more than the previous millennia. In 1905 Milner Dam upstream began diverting the Snake to irrigate the desert — the reclamation that gave the region its name, the Magic Valley — and the falls could run nearly dry by late summer. A hydroelectric plant built directly above the rim in 1907 takes a further share. Spring snowmelt still brings the full spectacle, with flows that can exceed 20,000 cubic feet per second in wet years. In 1974 Evel Knievel attempted to jump the canyon about a mile west of the falls in a rocket-powered cycle; his parachute opened early and he drifted, injured but alive, to the riverbank.
Did you know? The Lemhi Shoshone called themselves Agaidika, "salmon eaters", and speared fish below the falls with willow shafts tipped with elk horn.
05 Dry Falls, Washington
Dry Falls
United States47.606° N 119.354° W
Ikiwaner · CC BY-SA 3.0 This explanation was first proposed in the 1920s by the geologist J Harlen Bretz, and for decades it was rejected because catastrophic floods contradicted the gradualist thinking of geology at the time; landscapes like Dry Falls eventually helped to vindicate him. The cliff is protected within Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park, whose interpretive centre on the rim explains the floods. Above the falls, the upper Grand Coulee is now filled by Banks Lake.
Did you know? The floods recurred between roughly 15,000 and 13,000 years ago, with the lake filling and emptying on a cycle averaging about 55 years.
06 Eternal Flame Falls
United States · 22.7 km from Buffalo42.702° N 78.752° W
Mpmajewski · CC BY-SA 3.0 That source posed a puzzle. Shale usually has to reach around 100°C before its organic matter breaks down into natural gas, yet the rock feeding this flame is cooler, younger and shallower than typical gas-bearing shale, which suggests some other process, perhaps a natural catalyst, may be at work. The falls lie in the Shale Creek Preserve, once owned by the Buffalo Museum of Science and now part of Chestnut Ridge Park, a county park of more than 1,200 acres established in 1926. Long an obscure local curiosity, the falls drew so many visitors in the 2020s that the descent into the creek bed was rebuilt, with 139 steps and new railings completed in 2023.
Did you know? The gas rises from the Rhinestreet Shale, a rock formation laid down in the Late Devonian period.
07 Havasu Falls
United States36.255° N 112.698° W
Jeremy Evans · CC BY-SA 2.0 The canyon belongs to the Havasupai, whose reservation surrounds it and whose village, Supai, lies about a mile and a half upstream — a village with a general store and a cafe, but no road in. The combination of turquoise water, red rock and travertine terraces makes the whole stretch feel less like a desert canyon than an oasis.
Did you know? A government report lists fourteen historic floods in the canyon between 1899 and 1993, each capable of reshaping the falls.
08 Cumberland Falls
United States · 39.8 km from London36.838° N 84.344° W
Image by USA-Reiseblogger from Pixabay People have lived around the falls for some 10,000 years, and Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Creek peoples all knew the area. The explorer Thomas Walker is credited with naming it in 1750 after the Duke of Cumberland. A cabin built by the first settlers, Lewis and Mary Renfro, served as a hospital during the Civil War, and a hotel stood here from the 1870s. In the late 1920s a plan to divert the river through a tunnel for hydroelectric power threatened the falls; preservationists persuaded the industrialist T. Coleman du Pont to buy the land, and after his death his family gave it to Kentucky in 1930.
Did you know? The largest flow ever recorded at the falls came on 28 January 1918, at about 59,600 cubic feet per second.
09 Horsetail Fall
United States37.729° N 119.628° W
Ambitious Wench · CC BY-SA 2.0 It's also worth untangling from an older, unrelated spectacle with almost the same name: from 1899 to 1968, Yosemite ran an actual man-made "Firefall," pushing glowing embers off Glacier Point each evening as a tourist show, until park managers ended it for environmental reasons. Horsetail Fall's natural light effect got nicknamed "firefall" decades later — same word, no connection — and the two are still frequently mixed up. Growing crowds chasing the natural version have pushed the park to manage the viewing areas with shuttles and closures during the two-week window each February.
Did you know? Below its airborne plunge, the water slides about another 150 metres down steep granite slabs before reaching the valley side.
10 Palouse Falls
United States46.664° N 118.224° W
Стивен Лю · CC BY-SA 3.0 Palouse Falls was named Washington's official state waterfall in 2014, after elementary-school pupils from nearby Washtucna proposed the bill and the state House of Representatives passed it unanimously. The falls have one more claim to fame: on 21 April 2009 the kayaker Tyler Bradt paddled over the main drop, setting an unofficial world record for the highest waterfall descended in a kayak. The surrounding Palouse Falls State Park, established in 1951, is small, around 38 hectares, and day-use only.
Did you know? In 1984 a county utility proposed a 30-metre hydroelectric dam just upstream of the falls, but ratepayers voted against funding it.
11 Burney Falls
United States41.011° N 121.653° W
Image by willamlee from Pixabay The falls take their name from Samuel Burney, a settler who lived in the area in the 1850s. The McArthur family, who arrived later in the 19th century, bought the land to save it from development and gave it to the state in the 1920s, creating what is now McArthur–Burney Falls Memorial State Park, the second-oldest park in the California system. Theodore Roosevelt is said to have called the falls the eighth wonder of the world, and they were declared a National Natural Landmark in 1954. The Pacific Crest Trail passes through the park, and the falls have appeared on screen, including in scenes of "Willow" (1988).
Did you know? Before Willow, the falls had already appeared in The Parson and the Outlaw (1957) and Tarzan's Fight for Life (1958).
12 Akaka Falls State Park
United States · 18.1 km from Hilo19.854° N 155.154° W
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay For all its height, the waterfall is no barrier to some of the stream's native animals. The ʻoʻopu ʻalamoʻo, a goby found only in Hawaiʻi, spawns in the stream above the falls; its young are swept to the sea and later return, climbing the wet rock beside the falling water with a suction disc on the belly. A native shrimp, the ʻōpaekalaʻole, has likewise evolved to climb the cliff and live in Kolekole Stream. The park is managed by the Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources.
Did you know? Adult males of the climbing goby reach only about 7 centimetres, and they develop a yellow to bright red rear body that females lack.
13 Toketee Falls
United States43.263° N 122.431° W
Alexlockhart · CC BY-SA 4.0 The river above the falls is also put to work. Just upstream, a dam built by PacifiCorp as part of the North Umpqua Hydroelectric Project forms Toketee Lake, and much of the river's water is carried past the falls in a penstock to generate power, so the volume over the falls is lower than it once was. A post office named Toketee Falls operated from 1952 to 1956 while the hydroelectric works were under construction. A 33.8-mile stretch of the North Umpqua has been protected as a National Wild and Scenic River since 1988. The short trail to the viewpoint passes through old-growth forest of Douglas fir, bigleaf maple and western red cedar before reaching a platform above the gorge.
Did you know? In summer the North Umpqua carries about twenty times as much water as the neighbouring South Umpqua.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful waterfalls in the United States?
- On our list, Yosemite Falls ranks first, followed by Multnomah Falls and McWay Falls.
- What is the Yosemite firefall?
- For a few days in February, the setting sun can light up Horsetail Fall on the east face of El Capitan so that the water glows orange and red, like falling lava. It needs a clear sky and enough snowmelt to keep the fall flowing.
- Where can you see a moonbow in the United States?
- Cumberland Falls in Kentucky is one of the few places in the Western Hemisphere where a moonbow, a rainbow lit by moonlight, appears regularly in the mist on clear nights around a full moon.
- Why is Shoshone Falls called the Niagara of the West?
- Shoshone Falls on the Snake River in Idaho is about 65 metres high, taller than Niagara Falls, and spreads across a wide rim of volcanic rock.
- How many waterfalls are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 13 waterfalls.