THE DALLES — When skies are blue — when the snowy summit of Mount Hood is cloud-free and spring wildflowers burst forth in an explosion of color — there are few more glorious sights than the Columbia River Gorge.

But visitors need not run and hide if the weather is less than perfect. The indoor attractions of the Gorge nearly equal its outdoor appeal.

In fact, I suspect the Gorge has more museums, per capita, than anywhere else in the Pacific Northwest, with the possible exception of such small historic districts as Jacksonville, in Southern Oregon, or Wallace, Idaho.

At least 15 museums stand in the 60-plus miles of Columbia River between the mouth of the Deschutes River and the Bonneville Dam. These include regional and local collections of history, geology, transportation and art, not counting many other historical buildings, sites and exhibitions.

Foremost among them, perhaps, is the grand Maryhill Museum of Art, which appears out of place on the cliffs above the east end of the Gorge. Built as a private mansion during the era of World War I and converted to a museum at the start of the World War II, the museum has just completed the first expansion in its vibrant history. The $10 million Mary and Bruce Stevenson Wing will be officially dedicated today.

Of broader significance to the region are two modern, federally supported museums that bookend the Gorge. Both the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center and Museum in The Dalles and the Columbia Gorge Interpretive Center in Stevenson, Wash., offer extensive background on the formation and prehistory of the Gorge, its settlement and economic foundations.

Most surprising to me is a Hood River museum calling itself “WAAAM” — an acronym for the Western Antique Aeroplane and Automobile Museum. Opened 4 1/2 years ago beside a historic airfield, it displays more than 250 aircraft and motor vehicles. The vast majority of them are maintained in working order and taken out at least once a month for public demonstrations.

While the east end of the Gorge, near Maryhill and The Dalles, averages 14 inches of annual precipitation, just slightly more than Bend, the western Gorge is much damper. Hood River, a mere 23 miles from The Dalles, gets 31 inches of rainfall in a year, while Cascade Locks and Stevenson, 19 miles further west, average 77 inches. (Portland, by contrast, gets about 43 inches in a year.)

If you needed a reason to get inside, you may not need to look any further.

The Maryhill story

The story of Sam Hill and the Maryhill community has been frequently told. At the start of the 20th century, as he lobbied the Oregon Legislature to build what became the Historic Columbia River Highway, Hill bought 5,300 acres overlooking the Columbia and named it for his wife, Mary. Then the wealthy Quaker businessman set to work developing a utopian agricultural community. The hamlet never reached fruition, but a pacifist war memorial to fallen soldiers — a concrete replica of Britain’s Stonehenge — still stands eerily on a desolate bluff.

Four miles downriver, Hill constructed a three-story, Beaux Arts-style manor perched at the edge of a cliff 900 feet above the river. Encouraged by two friends — dancer Loie Fuller, of Paris, and Queen Marie of Romania — he began to transform it into an art museum where he could exhibit his diverse collections. Queen Marie, the daughter of England’s Queen Victoria, donated Russian Orthodox icons and royal Romanian regalia, including the gilt throne upon which she sat. Fuller added her personal collection of works by famed French sculptor Auguste Rodin, including original plaster studies of “The Thinker” and “The Burghers of Calais.”

After Hill died in 1931, unpacked crates of art stood inside the building for six years. Then another of Hill’s women friends — Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, wife of a San Francisco sugar magnate — took up the cause of completing work on the museum. She added her own collection of European and American oil paintings before the Maryhill Museum of Art opened to the public in May 1940.

These gifts remain on display today, along with a later Spreckels donation of miniature mannequins dressed in post-World War II French fashions. The eclectic collection also includes Hill’s own assortment of Native American basketry, beadwork and ancient petroglyphs; more than 100 chess sets from all over the world; and a gallery with details about Hill’s rich life.

The new, 25,000-square-foot wing, which I toured last weekend, does not so much add exhibit space as flexibility. Built partially underground and cantilevered to blend into the bluff, it boasts a broad plaza for special events with vistas of the Gorge. Inside are a full-size cafe, Loie’s, and an art-education center where workshops will be supplemented by computer stations.

Additional storage space will enable the Maryhill Museum to present temporary exhibits formerly beyond its grasp. Among them, said executive director Colleen Schafroth, are a showing of contemporary realist paintings by Cape Cod artists (June 9 to Sept. 3), and a compilation of 39 David Hockney etchings of Grimm’s fairy tales (Sept. 15 to Nov. 15). New outdoor sculpture has been added to the 26 acres of gardens that surround the museum, patrolled by loud and colorful peacocks.

Gorge Discovery

Go to Maryhill for the art, but plan a couple of hours at the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center and Museum for a history fix.

Located a short distance off Interstate 84 two miles west of The Dalles, the Discovery Center opened in 1997 at a cost of $21.5 million. It serves as the official interpretive center for the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, which extends west from Maryhill to the Portland suburbs, and incorporates the Wasco County Historical Museum.

There are two main sections to the facility, and both are impeccably curated.

In the main Discovery Center, vivid murals provide a visual backdrop to the geological and natural history of the Gorge, with a particular focus on the Ice Ages (ending about 12,000 years ago) and Bonneville floods. A replica plank house helps to illustrate native cultural history, and a family’s covered wagon on a riverborne raft is accompanied by audio depicting the trials of Oregon Trail immigrants.

Short videos describe the growth of the modern economy, from early fur-trapping and maritime pursuits to fishing, timber harvesting, orchards, electricity and tourism. Oral histories from Wasco and Umatilla Indians portray the native peoples’ hopes for the future.

The Wasco County Museum elucidates on the history of a county that was once the largest in the United States, extending all the way to the Continental Divide in modern Yellowstone National Park in the early years of the Oregon Territory. Exhibits include a recreated main street with a variety of shops as they might have appeared a century ago. There are also depictions of a riverboat depot and a salmon cannery, and a collection from a multi-generational family of saddle makers.

Most significant to the modern era is a section on construction of The Dalles Dam. When it was completed in 1957, the dam inundated the fishing grounds of Celilo Falls and the native village of Celilo, 13 miles upstream; archeologists say it had been continually occupied for 10,000 years. Yet the dam provided much-needed hydroelectric power and vastly improved modern river and rail transportation systems.

The tribes were paid $27 million as compensation for the loss of their fishery. Now, more than a half-century later, funds are being raised for an elaborate park to memorialize the site. Renowned architect Maya Lin was commissioned by the Confluence Project to design an arc-shaped walkway that will trace a section of the ancient falls. A completion date has not yet been projected.

Two smaller Discovery Center galleries display a fine collection of items from the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803-06. There’s also a hands-on children’s gallery, a cafe and a gift shop. Outside is a small enclosure for rescued raptors and an interpretive trail that winds through 50 acres of native plant restoration.

‘She Who Watches’

Near the wet west end of the Gorge, on the Washington shore near the well-known Skamania Lodge, the Columbia Gorge Interpretive Center offers a more extensive look at early Native American culture. The likeness of Tsagaglalal, “She Who Watches,” a prehistoric chief immortalized in an upriver petroglyph, introduces a fine exhibit on the myths and spiritual beliefs of the ancient Chinook-speaking tribes who inhabited this region.

Sections on pioneer settlement deploy such large artifacts as a giant fish wheel, an early logging truck and an 1876 steam engine to describe early industry. But description of geology is left primarily to a 12-minute movie, “The Creation of the Gorge,” in a dedicated 45-seat mezzanine theater, and to a sequence of 1980 photographs of the erupting Mount St. Helens, immediately north of the Gorge.

On the second floor of the Interpretive Center are local community exhibits, including historical photographs and artifacts such as children’s toys. One full room is devoted to the heritage of Asian immigrants, another to spiritual life. In the latter is the Don Brown Collection of 4,000 Roman Catholic rosaries, which the museum claims is the world’s largest.

East, up the Washington side of the Columbia, is the small Gorge Heritage Museum in tiny Bingen. South, across the river from Stevenson, is the Cascade Locks Historical Museum. But of more impact than either of these local collections is the Columbia Gorge Sternwheeler.

Two or three times daily from May through October, this 499-passenger ship cruises the Gorge from the Bonneville Locks to Herman Creek, passing beneath the historic Bridge of the Gods on a narrated four-hour voyage. This replica of the vessels that traveled the Columbia in the late 19th century is, in itself, a living museum.

Wings and wheels

A century’s worth of antique aircraft are packed strut to fender with classic cars, combat Jeeps, tractors and motorcycles at WAAAM, the Western Antique Aeroplane and Automobile Museum three miles south of downtown Hood River.

Two full-size hangars, with an acre of floor space each, house the collection, established at the 1927 Ken Jernstedt airfield in September 2007.

“It’s all wings and wheels and human stories,” said assistant director Donna Davidson.

Davidson is an avid aviatrix who said she learned to fly at Jernstedt Field as a teenager. Twenty-three years after graduating from high school, she returned to Hood River with her husband just as founder Terry Brandt was establishing WAAAM.

His collection then stood at 42 planes and a half-dozen road vehicles. It has since increased by more than 500 percent; with about three-fourths of the cars and planes loaned from other private collections.

What makes WAAAM special, said Davidson, is that more than 90 percent of its antique machines are in full operating condition, including an 1899 Locomobile steam car “that accelerates from 0 to 40 in about 45 minutes,” she joked.

Since March 2010 — on the second Saturday of every month — the museum takes many of its planes and cars from the hangars for public demonstrations. Such planes as a 1917 Curtiss Jenny and a 1937 Aeronica LC are the only ones of their kind in the world that are still flying, Davidson said.

Flying and driving lessons are available, too. Most popular are the Model T driving lessons offered once a month, at the end of June, July and August, at a cost of $150 to the public.

In town, the Hood River County Museum has a heritage collection that includes photos of early wind surfing in the Columbia Gorge. Currently, however, it is closed for renovation.

Historical landmarks

The region’s best local history collection is found at the Fort Dalles Museum, about a mile uphill from downtown The Dalles in the heart of a residential neighborhood. Built in 1856 as the residence of the fort’s surgeon, the museum is more than 100 years old. On the property are six other buildings, including the 1895 Anderson Homestead, built of hand-hewn logs.

Among other historical structures in The Dalles — the city has more than two dozen dating from the 1800s — is the original 1858 Wasco County Courthouse. But no building is more prominent than Old St. Peter’s Landmark, a red-brick Catholic Church whose 176-foot steeple was raised above the city in 1897. And none may be better known than the Baldwin Saloon, built in 1876 and a popular restaurant since 1991.

With destinations all over the Gorge, I stayed in a small village, on the Washington side of the Columbia, without any museums.

But the Lyle Hotel was like a museum in its own right. A historic, 10-room railway inn, it is a two-story, European-style lodge with shared bathrooms. And although the station is gone, trains still rumble past several times each day and night. Best of all, chef-owners Steve Little and Marianne Lewis helped me to feel right at home with gourmet dinners and weekend brunches.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate luxury in lodgings. In Hood River, for instance, I could have combined indulgence with history at the 1920 Columbia Gorge Hotel. I could have dined nearby in a secluded woodland estate at Stonehedge Gardens.

But on this occasion, the Lyle Hotel combined value with quality. And under clear blue skies, that was all I really needed.