Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a promising approach for a variety of applications. Routing protocol for WSNs is very challenging because it should be simple, scalable, energy-efficient, and robust to deal with a very large number of nodes, and also self-configurable to node failures and changes of the network topology dynamically. Recently, many researchers have focused on developing hierarchical protocols for WSNs. However, most protocols in the literatures cannot scale well to large sensor networks and difficult to apply in the real applications. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive routing protocol for WSNs called ARPEES. The main design features of the proposed method are: energy efficiency, dynamic event clustering, and multi-hop relay considering the trade-off relationship between the residual energy available of relay nodes and distance from the relay node to the base station. With a distributed and light overhead traffic approach, we spread energy consumption required for aggregating data and relaying them to different sensor nodes to prolong the lifetime of the whole network. In this method, we consider energy and distance as the parameters in the proposed function to select relay nodes and finally select the optimal path among cluster heads, relay nodes and the base station. The simulation results show that our routing protocol achieves better performance than other previous routing protocols.