Picture this: you emerge from your wooded hike to hear water gurgling and rushing over the falls, and as you make your way to the waterfall, you are struck by its beauty. Part of the lushness of nature, waterfalls are often seasonal and emerge out of snowmelt, while some are there year-round. If you want to find the most beautiful ones, the company BonusFinder has released a study that analyzed more than 2,700 US landmarks, including 79 waterfalls, to rank them by their social media hashtags.
Oregon’s Multnomah Falls is the most picturesque waterfall; it received more than 289,000 pictures hashtagged on Instagram. At 620 feet, it’s the state’s tallest waterfall, and more than 2 million visitors stop by to see it each year on Multnomah Creek in the Columbia River Gorge. It’s the most visited natural recreation site in the Pacific Northwest. The falls are at their most powerful in winter and spring.
Second on the list is Yosemite Falls inside Yosemite National Park, with 232,929 hashtags. It’s the tallest waterfall in North America at 2,425 feet. Visit it any time of year as it’s nearly almost always flowing, although it’s a gusher in May or June and may be only a trickle by August. Yosemite in winter can provide beautiful photography, as some of its waterfalls develop frost along their edges overnight.
This third one kind of seems like it ought to be in the first place, as an iconic waterfall that many people have built vacations around for centuries. It’s Niagara Falls in New York, with 174,346 hashtags. This astonishing, enormous, thundering phenomenon has to be seen to be believed. Although it’s only 325 feet high, it stretches in tremendous width with several different waterfalls named. For instance, its Horseshoe Falls is about 2,590 feet wide. A sound and light show plays on its waters at night, and there’s now a tunnel under the falls you can walk through.
The top 10 waterfalls in the U.S. are:
1. Multnomah Falls, Oregon (289,000 hashtags)
2. Yosemite Falls, Yosemite National Park, California (232,929 hashtags)
3. Niagara Falls, New York (174,346 hashtags)
4. Snoqualmie Falls, Washington (160,559 hashtags)
5. Rainbow Falls, Hilo, Hawai’i (138,524 hashtags)
6. Vernal Falls, Yosemite National Park, California (115,766 hashtags)
7. Manoa Falls, Oahu, Hawai’i (94,242 hashtags)
8. Wailua Falls, Kauai, Hawai’i (91,080 hashtags)
9. Minnehaha Falls, Minnesota (82,598 hashtags)
10. McWay Falls, California (78,449 hashtags)
To see where all 79 waterfalls fall on the list of 2,700 U.S. landmarks, visit the full report.