Mossy Falls

The next obscure Gorge waterfall we're visiting actually gets a lot of foot traffic, but most people walk right by and ignore it. It's on the Return Trail (#442), the one-mile-ish path that connects the Multnomah Falls parking lot to the Wahkeena Falls parking lot, just so people doing various loop hikes can get back to their cars without walking down the road and getting run over. In general it has got to be the easiest and least interesting trail in the entire Gorge, and it has either zero scenic highlights or one, depending on what you think of place we're visiting now. The problem here is that the waterfall is fairly seasonal: It flows strongly in the winter and into early spring, when almost nobody is here to see it, but it shrinks down to a wall of cool drippy moss during high tourist season. I have never seen it dry up entirely, though I can't claim this never happens. It's maybe not the most dramatic, stupendous sight in the Gorge, and a lot of people on the Return Trail are tired and hungry and just want to get to their cars and go home at this point in the hike, so the big wall-o-moss doesn't get a lot of attention, except from a few people who like to use it as a nice cold trailside shower. But it's kind of cool in its own way, if you have time to slow down and look at it for a few minutes.

The name "Mossy Falls" seems to have originated with a 2016 entomology paper: "Surveys to Determine the Status and Distribution of Three Columbia River Gorge Endemic Caddisfly and Stonefly Species: Farula constricta, Neothremma andersoni, and Nanonemoura wahkeena". The waterfall was one of several locations around the western Gorge that the researchers focused on, and the paper needed to refer to the falls enough that they went ahead and gave it a name. As the people who have most likely paid the most attention to it of anyone in history, it seems only fair to go with the name they came up with.

The study found that Mossy Falls is home to a population of Farula constricta, a rare species of caddisfly with a rather constricted range, hence the name. It lives here, plus Mist and Wahkeena Falls to the west, and then at Nesika and Waespe Falls, and in Oneonta Gorge, and also at Eagle Creek. That actually makes it the most widely distributed of the three species they were studying, but it's still only found within a 12 mile stretch of the Gorge, at lower elevations, and only at the base of waterfalls, and nowhere else in the known universe. Here's how the authors describe it:

Farula constricta (OR-SEN) is a small, dark brown caddisfly reaching lengths of 5 mm (Wiggins & Wisseman 1992). Larvae of this species make extremely slender, smooth cases out of tiny sand grains; they can be mistaken for conifer needles (Wiggins 1996, Figure 2). Adults have been found at lower elevations in the Gorge in April and May, and the flight season may extend from March through June (Wisseman 2015; see Appendix II). The preferred habitat for F. constricta caddisflies is small, cool perennial streams at waterfalls and talus slopes below waterfalls. This is the most widely distributed of the three target species and had been found in several different basins, ranging from Mist Falls near Wahkeena Creek in the west to Eagle Creek in the east (Figure 1). It has a global status of G1, a national status of N1, and a state status of S1 in Oregon (NatureServe 2015, ORBIC 2013).

The other two species in the title are only found in the Wahkeena Creek watershed and apparently nowhere else. Or at least they were there before the 2017 forest fire. If anyone has gone back to check in on these little beasties since 2017, I haven't seen any publications about it.

Also, before I get anyone's hopes up about this place being a cavalcade of cute charismatic critters, I did visit a couple of times during what I think was peak caddisfly season, and saw lots of small bugs flitting around at top speed but couldn't get a good look at one, and frankly I have no idea what I was looking at. Most likely the only way to get a good look at one would be if it was deceased, and I'm certainly not going to do that just to satisfy a bit of personal curiosity.

Elsewhere in the animal kingdom, the creek might also be home to the somewhat rare Cascade torrent salamander, which reportedly lives in Wahkeena Creek and "an unnamed creek 500m east of Wahkeena Falls". Though I have never seen any salamanders here, though I suppose if they held really still they might avoid being seen. And somewhere around the Wahkeena Creek watershed there's a spring that's home to Stygobromus wahkeenensis, the Wahkeena Creek Amphipod, a tiny crustacean that (like those two caddisfly species) just lives in that one spring and nowhere else. Wahkeena Creek is also the sole home of Parasimulium crosskeyi (a species of primitive black fly, found in 1977) and Stylodrilus wahkeenensis (a small freshwater aquatic worm, discovered in 1996). Meanwhile Multnomah Creek, just down the trail and right in the heart of tourist central, is home to Acneus oregonensis, a species of water-penny beetle that was discovered there in 1951 and has apparently never been found anywhere else. I don't know of anything that's only been seen here at Mossy Falls, but it's possible biologists just don't look for things here quite as often as they look in the more well-known places.

If you think you may have heard of Mossy Falls before while poking around out on the general interwebs, you might be thinking of Mossy Grotto Falls, which is on Ruckel Creek (the next creek east of Eagle Creek), and is the next waterfall upstream from (Lower) Ruckel Creek Falls (which we visited back in 2011). Mossy Grotto was Instagram's favorite off-trail "secret" waterfall for a while back in 2015, right around when "extreme HDR" was the hot trendy aesthetic people couldn't get enough of. So I avoided the place at first and then forgot all about it, successfully avoiding Instagram fame and fortune as a result, and going there now to do yoga poses is probably not the license to print money that it once was. I dunno, if my IG feed is any indication, the current Algorithm just wants to show me a bunch of low quality AI-generated car crash videos for some reason.

There aren't any official numbers on how tall this waterfall is, but that's something we can figure out for ourselves, thanks to the state LIDAR map and the magic of grade school-level subtraction. Looking at it here on LIDAR indicates the drop here comes to around 145 feet, plus there's an additional upper tier you can't see from the Return Trail that adds another 150 feet, and counting the two tiers together means Mossy Falls is actually around 50 feet taller than Wahkeena Falls next door. That seems kind of excessive, but I'm just relaying what the map seems to be telling me. And it does make a degree of sense: If the two formed at the same time, and they flow over essentially the same kinds of rocks, and in general all other factors are held equal, the one that flows less will also erode less, and it'll eventually end up as the taller of the two.

The lack of a common well-known name makes it hard to search for other info about the place, and I only have a few scant things. There are blog posts at Orangeinall, Loomis Adventures, and Hiking Northwest and one 2006 OregonHikers thread. The embedded photo in that thread doesn't appear due to an http vs https thing, but a direct link to the photo seems to work ok.

The only other name I've ever encountered for this place is "Benson Ice", which is what the local ice climbing community calls it when it freezes, probably because the creek flows into Benson Lake, the centerpiece of Benson State Park. Multnomah Falls flows into the same lake after passing under Benson Bridge, and there's already a Camp Benson Falls out near Hood River, named after a nearby Depression-era CCC camp, and an obscure Benson Falls on a tributary of Eagle Creek that tumbles down off the Benson Plateau. And all of these things are, in turn, named after either Simon Benson, a local timber baron/philanthropist (who bought up the land around Multnomah and Wahkeena falls and donated it to the City of Portland), or his son Amos, who continued on with the family philanthropy-ing. Portland also has a bunch of drinking fountains, a high school, a hotel, and a historic house named "Benson", and likely other stuff I'm not aware of, and that's already more than enough public recognition for any one person no matter what they've accomplished, and there was no freaking way I was going to use the B-word for the falls here. So thanks, entomologists!