Foxglove Falls

Next up we're taking a peek (albeit not a very close peek) at the Columbia Gorge's Foxglove Falls. This is the waterfall you can see looking east from the top of Angels Rest, tumbling down the far wall of the deep canyon on that side of the viewpoint. I think it's right about here on the state LIDAR map. The canyon is due to Dalton Creek, which we've visited a couple of times downstream in the Dalton Point and Old Boneyard Road posts, and we were in the vicinity of in the Backstrand Road post. The creek is just not very big, and just goes to show what a little water can do to solid rock (albeit relatively weak and crumbly solid rock) over geological time.

As far as I know the Angels Rest viewpoint is the closest mere mortals can get to it without advanced technical gear and skills that I don't have. Although way back in 1918 there was a short-lived proposal to turn the whole Angels Rest area into a private tourist attraction, complete with pack mule trail rides just like at the Grand Canyon, promising great views of the hanging gardens above Dalton Creek among other things. That obviously never panned out, and I'm not sure how serious of an idea it ever was, as the proposal was just one of a series of real estate and stock schemes that had played out over the previous few years. The most serious of these plans involved the backers laying their grubby hands on the bankrupt woolen mill at Pendleton, relocating it to a new company town right at Wahkeena Falls (then known as "Gordon Falls"), damming Wahkeena Creek to power the mill, and Dalton Creek to supply water to Gordon Falls City (the future great metropolis of the western Gorge) and of course selling a bunch of unregulated stock to finance this exciting new 100% guaranteed goldmine. Except that the deal fell through when local interests in Pendleton bought the woolen mill instead, and shareholders in the Gordon Falls Co. lost every cent of their money overnight. It was never clarified whether the backers knew this was about to happen, but they somehow managed to hold onto the land after the company cratered and soon tried a few other moneymaking schemes continuing into the 1920s, like the pack mule adventure park, and at least one proposal to build mansions all over the top of Angels Rest, before eventually losing the land over unpaid taxes during the Depression.

If you're wondering why the waterfall isn't called "Dalton Falls", after the creek, I'm afraid it's a long story. There was a minor local internet controversy about this back in the mid-2000s, and like most internet controversies it was never really resolved to anyone's satisfaction. The name currently applies to a prominent seasonal waterfall on a different creek just west of Mist Falls (and right around HCRH Milepost 31), which we've visited a couple of times, here and here. A theory gained currency that this mismatch was a fairly recent mistake, either by uninformed people on the early internet, possibly echoing a misguided guidebook author or two in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s. The name and location of the creek (and its mouth at Dalton Point) were pretty well documented, thanks to various surveys and property records, so (the idea went) the real Dalton Falls should be somewhere around here too.

Eventually people settled on the waterfall below (and semi-glimpse-able from) Angels Rest as the most likely candidate, the theory being that it was probably named not long after the area was logged, and it would have been a lot more prominent back then. And I think that's the explanation I've repeated here a few times. But then the Eagle Creek Fire happened, and that made Foxglove Falls much easier to see from the Angels Rest viewpoint (like in the photos here), and closer to what people would have seen a century ago. But it still isn't a prominent sight from down on the old highway. So now I'm not really sure anymore. As in, maybe the creek and the falls were always in different watersheds, a testament to the once-widespread fame of the mysterious W. Dalton they're both named for. The name seems to have existed already when the old highway was still under construction, so maybe the falls are a lot more prominent when seen from further away, like on a steamboat heading upriver (for example), than they are from the HCRH. That's certainly true for Mist Falls as well as the "Dalton Falls" at milepost 31, where up close you can only see the very lowest tier of the falls. But then, making an accurate, detailed map from a steamboat was subject to its own hazards back then, like having a bourbon or three too many, losing all your money playing cards with a friendly gentleman named after a state (or even worse, two states, like "Colorado Tex"), and then the friendly ladies wearing all those feathers abruptly stop paying attention to you after you run out of silver dollars. Why, it's enough to make a mild-mannered cartographer scribble "Dalton Falls" on just any old place, and we've been stuck with it ever since.

This whole thing would've been helped immeasurably if anyone had thought to make a clearly labeled set of daguerreotypes of second-tier Gorge landmarks back in the day, but no examples of that have surfaced so far. Barring that, the other thing that would resolve this pretty quickly would be newly-discovered evidence that W. Dalton was some kind of monster and needed cancelling. Like maybe he came west while on the run from charges back home in Alabama, where he was accused of mistreating his many, many slaves. Or something along those lines. And as a result every last thing that might have been named after him, here and across the northwest, would have to be renamed.

Meanwhile the name "Foxglove Falls" is relatively recent, originating in a 2007 OregonHikers thread as a way to sidestep arguments about various things named Dalton. It featured in a number of forum threads there after the name was invented:

• April 2007: "Hidden in plain sight: a waterfall at Angels Rest!"
• February 2008: "Foxglove Falls 2-9-08"
• late February 2008: "Angels Rest via Foxglove Canyon"
• late February 2010: "Guess where I went today..(Revealed: Foxglove creek) 2-20-10"
• Early December 2010: "Foxglove Creek"
• Mid-December 2010: "Dalton Falls to Mist Falls Loop 12/19/10"
• Late December 2010: "Dalton - Foxglove Conundrum"
• Later December 2010: "Mesachie Creek"
• Mid-December 2013: "No Waterfalls on Devils Rest 11-Dec-2013"
• Late December 2013: "Angel's Rest (Nostalgia) Trip! (Dec 27)"
• March 2017: Angel's Rest direct (bowl to the east)"
• December 2018: "Palmer Mill Rd/Primrose Path - Dec 7, 2018"

It also has a Northwest Waterfall Survey page now, and generally seems pretty established at this point. The page wisely doesn't hazard a guess as to how tall it might be; the LIDAR link up above points at what looks like the most prominent single drop in a series of closely spaced drops, each in the 20'-40' range, with the creek rushing steeply downhill between them, and at one end of the scale you could point at the one bit I think I have photos of, which might be in the 40' range. Lumping them together with the top here and the bottom here gives a total height of 220', while pulling in everything from the very top to the point where all four main tributary creeks join together here comes to 436', almost exactly 11x as tall as the low-end number. So that's not especially useful, as vital statistics go.

Regarding the new namesake: Foxglove is not native to the Pacific Northwest, but you may see it growing as an invasive plant in the Angels Rest area. It seems that decades ago, someone involved in building or maintaining the unofficial trail network above Angels Rest was also an amateur gardener, and as this was before the modern environmental movement got going, it seemed like a good idea at the time to combine two hobbies and improve the forest with some of their favorite ornamental plants, and then name a few of the trails after what's planted along them. So until quite recently there were three trails named Foxglove (Foxglove Way, along with the Upper and Lower Foxglove Trails), and a steep, rocky Primrose Path that apparently needed a re-primrosing on a fairly regular basis, and I think a couple of other plant-themed ones whose names escape me at the moment.

Sometime around January 2022, another anonymous individual decided three trails was entirely too many Foxgloves and unilaterally renamed a couple of them. Renamed them in the OregonHikers Field Guide wiki, and on OpenStreetMap, and even posted freshly-made hand-carved wooden signs at all of the affected trail junctions, replacing the few decades-old ones that had survived the Eagle Creek Fire. Whether you like the change or not, you have to respect that level of dedication.