Bridge Creek Falls

Next we're paying a quick visit to Bridge Creek Falls, in the Oregon Coast Range right off Highway 6, at the Tillamook State Forest's "Footbridge Day Use Area and Trailhead". Like most of the recreation spots along Highway 6, the turnoff is a bit awkward and you'll miss it entirely if you blink at the wrong time.

Getting to the falls from the parking lot is not difficult if you know what you're doing. The one exciting part is that the falls are on the other side of the highway, so you have to walk back up to the road, look for the trail on the other side of the highway, and sprint across when nobody's coming. Be patient and wait as long as you need to, or come back a different day when the road isn't packed with seniors in RVs and angry business dudes in BMWs who desperately want to pass the RVs. Or more precisely, they paid good money for that M5, and Highway 6 would be an ideal road for doing M5 stuff except for that one stupid RV chugging along at 20mph. Now if there was just a good place to whip around those geezers and really floor it the way its Bavarian creators intended... which in practice means you get to catch up to the next RV that much faster. And somehow there's always another RV up there chugging away. Passing one RV is easy. Passing another one every 10 minutes is annoying but doable. But somehow, passing all of them is a whole different sort of problem, and might involve some variation on Zeno's paradox.

Assuming you don't get M5'd while crossing the street, there's an old sign for the trail. It's the only sign, for the only trail, you can't miss it. The first thing you'll notice are stairs. And not just any stairs, created with dirt and boards and maybe some chicken wire. No, these are carved stone stairs, made by people who knew what they were doing, and they don't look recent. What you're looking at is a vestige of the 1930s WPA project that created Highway 6 in more or less its current form. Modernizing the old Wilson River Road became urgent after summer 1933, when the northern Coast Range was devastated by the first of the Tillamook Burn series of forest fires. At one point the new road was planned to open by December 1936, per this map, but that goal slipped due to funding and construction difficulties. Over the course of the year, the project was repeatedly funded and canceled, and authorities quarreled over things they should have worked out before starting, like who was paying for what, and whether the road could legally charge tolls.

Things continued along that way for a few more years, and eventually 1941 rolled around and the road was finally almost ready to open. So they announced a grand opening gala for August 19th, but quickly canceled that, blaming it on a typo. Then the September 19 date was rained out, and the new road finally opened without fanfare in October 1941. The state planned to treat this as a sort of soft opening and still have the planned grand opening gala in the following spring. I couldn't find any indication that this ever actually happened. I imagine that, like a lot of big plans, it just sort of fell by the wayside after Pearl Harbor.

During all that news about the roadwork, there wasn't anything in the paper about their plans for the Bridge Creek area specifically, or a list of places that were be brought up to WPA standards. The latter would be interesting in case there are other examples of their design work along the way, but forgotten out there in the forest somewhere. And maybe there are still records of a master plan on file somewhere, though I'm not sure who gets those after the responsible federal agency is abolished, like the WPA was. Maybe the National Archives would have that? In any case, Oregon newspapers did not mention Bridge Creek Falls by name until the 2020s: First a March 2020 roundup of scenic Coast Range waterfalls worth visiting, and again in October 2021 as one of the highlights of the Wilson River Trail.

Some links from around the interwebs, mostly concerning the falls, the river, the footbridge over the river, and the various trails radiating out from the far side of the bridge.

• OregonWaterfalls
• Waterfall Record
• PNW Photo Blog
• Aaron's Waterfall World
• The Outdoor Project
• The Hiking Project
• Trail Run Project
• Oregon Discovery
• The Narrative Image
• Day by Day - Rock Climbing & Life
• Wandering Yuncks
• my morning moxie
• Paul's Bizarre Website

Oh, and there's also

another Bridge Creek Falls in Oregon, in Deschutes County, upstream of famous Tumalo Falls. That waterfall was even mentioned once in the Oregonian a few years before the coastal one, in a 2017 article about things to do in the Bend area.