The population was 16,010 at the 2020 census, and it is the largest city in Oregon along the Columbia River outside the Portland Metropolitan Area.

The Dalles is 75 miles (121 km) east of Portland, within the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area.

The area around The Dalles is known to have been a trading center for Native Americans as long as 10,000 years ago and is thus one of the oldest inhabited places in North America.

The War of 1812 led to the 1813 liquidation of the PFC, its properties like Fort Astoria sold to the North West Company.

The rapids of the Columbia River at The Dalles was the largest and longest of the four "great portages", where fur trading boats had to unload and transship their cargoes.

Sometimes, during high water, boats traveling downriver would "shoot the rapids" instead of portaging, although the practice was dangerous and many people died as a result over the years.

[9] In the early 1840s American settlers began to arrive in significant numbers, traveling overland via the Oregon Trail.

Until the construction of the Barlow Road in 1846, the only way to reach Fort Vancouver and the Willamette Valley was by rafting down the river from The Dalles.

The supply of gold from Canyon City began to dwindle, however, and other problems, such as cost overruns, workers leaving to work the gold fields, and flooding from the Columbia River, also contributed to the project running two years behind schedule and led eventually to its demise.

[13] In 1970, the Bonneville Power Administration opened the Celilo Converter Station near the northern terminus of the Pacific DC Intertie which sends 3,100 megawatts of electricity to Los Angeles.

[15] In 2018, Terry A. Davis, creator of the TempleOS operating system, walked from Portland, Oregon to The Dalles in three days via the Columbia River Gorge.

The city's location in the eastern Columbia Gorge results in the presence of numerous microclimates within a few miles of town.

The generally warm and dry summers near town make it the ideal climate for the numerous Bing cherry orchards in the area.

From late September through early November, the area experiences an abrupt autumn during which normal temperatures drop very rapidly and cloudy, wet weather quickly picks up.

Prior to the sudden onset of the rainy season in mid- to late fall, there are often days with a very wide disparity between daytime and nighttime temperatures, sometimes exceeding 36 °F or 20 °C.

Despite the rain shadow effect created by the Cascades, there is still enough precipitation most years to support relatively high soil moisture levels for most of the winter.

Springtime conditions generally run from late February through early June, during which time the overall trend gradually becomes warmer and drier and the landscape briefly turns lush and green.

During stormy periods in spring, conditions are usually cloudy and cool, while most sunny and calm days become intensely warm, especially from April onward.

The growing season is roughly 200 days long in a typical year, generally running from early April through most of October.

The new complex includes two buildings, each approximately the size of a football field, and two cooling plants, each four stories high.

The project promised hundreds of jobs in the area, mainly in construction, with an additional 200 permanent positions expected later in 2006 although as of 2013 Google employed only 150 combined company employees and contractors in The Dalles.

[26] The Dalles is also home to the main campus of Columbia Gorge Community College which began in 1977 as Wasco Area Education Service District.

[32] In 1984, The Dalles was the scene of a bioterrorist incident launched by members of the Rajneesh Movement in an attempt to gain control of the local government of Wasco County, which failed on Election Day.

[37] The circumstances of the attack are documented in an American Medical Association article (JAMA Vol 278, No 5, page 389, 6 Aug 1997).