Dougan Creek Falls

Next up we've got a few photos of Dougan Creek Falls, a small waterfall a short walk from Dougan Falls, which we just visited in the previous post. Dougan Falls is on the Washougal River, about an hour's drive NE from Portland; Dougan Creek flows into the river just downstream of there; and Dougan Creek Falls is on the creek a short distance upstream from that confluence, if that makes sense. Or you could just go to the other post and look at the embedded map there. I mentioned this waterfall briefly in the Dougan Falls post, saying it's not worth driving an hour to see on its own merits, but if you're visiting the main falls anyway you might as well go have a look. So here we are, visiting it in a separate post, because I decided that was a rule here at one point a long time ago. Was I really that worried about running out of material? I don't remember why anymore, but changing the rule now would lead to things being inconsistent, which would bug me.

Only some of these photos are of the actual falls. Others are of the fast-flowing stretch of creek between there and the Washougal River, which is pretty photogenic too, with a few drops almost as tall as the 'real' waterfall. Though some of those are over very large logs, and waterfall pedants are in furious agreement that water flowing over a log doesnt count as a real waterfall no matter how big the log is. There's also a stretch where the creek slides over some bare rock at a low angle, and I gather there's a debate about what the minimum angle the drop has to be before it counts. And what all this really boils down to is that I wasn't sure what Dougan Creek Falls was supposed to look like going into this, so I took lots of photos of the whitewater parts just in case any of them turned out to be the thing I was there to see.

I was going to work in an analogy about this being the "B side" attraction, or the B movie on a double bill, before remembering that very few people under 50, or 40 tops, have any idea what those things even are. A more recent analogy might be, well, just about everything on basic cable for the last couple of decades. But I'm not sure anyone under 40 watches a lot of basic cable these days and likely never did. Ok, so in modern video game terms this is a side quest that pads out your total play time by a bit (so it feels more like you got your money's worth) but doesn't contribute to the main thrust of the game. I think that gets roughly the same idea across. Though I was never much of a gamer, to be honest.