Next up we have some recent photos from Tamanawas Falls, a ~100 foot waterfall a short distance from OR 35, due east of Mt. Hood, right around where the drive time is the same if you take I-84 to OR35 South via Hood River, or US26 to OR35 North via Government Camp. The hike (OregonHikers | AllTrails) is a fairly easy (albeit rocky) 3.4 mile roundtrip, and the trailhead is right on OR35 (so there's no driving on any sketchy logging roads), and the falls at the end are spectacular, so it's quite a popular trail. At least for a place this far from Portland. If you prefer to hike in complete solitude, this trail is probably not the one for you, but if you like visiting with friendly dogs you'll probably have a good time.
One couple on the trail was hiking with around six dogs, at least half of which were Corgis. I was about to say something along the lines of "If they can do it, you can do it", to try to sound positive and encouraging for once, but realized it wasn't a fair comparison. A single Corgi might struggle on the trail, but put them in a group and they seem to reinforce each other, and all things are possible given enough Corgis cheering each other on. When they have to get up a steep bit of hill, they seem to tackle it one by one while the others beam positive energy at the one currently climbing, and everyone is really stoked once the whole mutual support group is past the latest obstacle. Which unfortunately means they're hopeless at anything that involves all of them working together in unison, like pulling a dogsled.
These photos were taken in fall 2024, and fall seems to be a great time to visit; the trail isn't all that high up -- the maximum elevation you'll encounter is only around 3500 feet -- so you most likely won't have to trudge through snow in September or October, but it's still high enough that autumn leaves start turning while there's still plenty of afternoon daylight available. And then on the way home you can stop for a bite to eat and wait out the blinding sunset light in your eyes on the way home. The internet largely disagrees with me, of course, and the consensus seems to be that you absolutely must go do the trail in the depths of winter, preferably by snowshoe, or dogsled, or probably by fixie snow unicycle (you probably haven't heard of it) just to be Xtreme™ and one-up everyone you know and then wonder why they never want to hang out. Which, as it turns out, is exactly why these people have so much free time to spend opining online about the one and only correct way to do various things.
I do want to add a couple of Useful Protips from this trip. First, if you're going here, or anywhere run by the Forest Service in the Northwest, and you want to know whether you need a Northwest Forest Pass to park there, their website is more authoritative on this point than the various enthusiast websites out there, no matter how good they are in other respects. In particular, the OregonHikers page for the trailhead said something about the pass only being required during prime tourist season, and it may still say that, and maybe that was true at some point. But these days Uncle Sam needs five of your dollars if want to park here, any time of the year. I get that some people ignore this, whether on principle or because they're just cheapskates. And I honestly don't know how strictly they actually enforce this -- it probably matters a lot how close you are to the nearest ranger station, for one thing -- and I also don't know what they typically do to violators -- whether it's just a federal parking ticket on your windshield, or they actually tow your car and leave you stranded out in the middle of nowhere. There have been a couple of times in the past where I decided to just chance it, and nothing bad ever happened when I did that, but I also enjoyed the hike less due to getting stressed out over it. So I pay up and then I can relax and just worry about car breakins. You might think that a big parking lot full of vehicles at $5 a pop (or $30 for the annual pass) ought to cover hiring a security guard to watch the lot, at least for summer weekends, but apparently that's not how it works.
Just to add to that, in 2025 the hot new trend in forest recreation management is to have a concessionare take over running a given site and opt out of honoring the $5 pass, or any pass other than the $30 annual one. They generally want $10 for a day pass for just that site, which really adds up if you want to visit one place in the morning and another after lunch. On the bright side, the $5 pass still exists, technically, and it still costs only $5; it's just that the number of places you can actually use one keeps dwindling. Tamanawas Falls parking was still $5 when I was there, but your mileage may vary, and if it does it probably won't vary in the downward direction.
Ok, second protip: If you rely on Google Maps for driving directions, be sure to ask for directions to Tamanawas Falls Trailhead, not Tamanawas Falls. This matters because Google interprets the latter to mean you want to drive to a point as close as possible to the waterfall itself, no matter what the road to that point is like, and getting there via the normal trailhead is not a priority. In this case Google has you leave Highway 35 a few miles south of here, and directs you onto Forest Service road NF-3520-620, a steep, narrow gravel logging road that climbs around 500' vertical feet up onto Bluegrass Ridge, ending at a point that, yes, is pretty close to the falls as the crow flies, definitely closer than the official trailhead will get you. On the other hand, the crow can soar gracefully over multi-hundred foot cliffs and you can't, or at least you can't more than once. And before you even get to that point, the main problem is that the road is also marked Unmaintained & Closed To Vehicle Traffic, so there's almost certainly a locked Forest Service gate in the way. If you can get past that somehow, legally or otherwise, there will most likely be fallen trees across the road, so bring a chainsaw. (Note that the legal way involves passing a civil service exam and joining the Forest Service, starting out at Junior Assistant Outhouse Inspector, and slowly working your way up the federal seniority ladder until the Forest Service starts trusting you with keys to things, which could take a while.) And long story short, this might be the closest road to Tamanawas Falls, but it's not likely to be the fastest. My photoset includes a couple of photos of the trailhead and parking lot, and if you park somewhere that doesn't look like that, you are in the wrong place.
Geology
Our story starts around 29,000 years ago, the last time (or one of the last times) that an eruption of Mount Hood included actual lava flowing down and away from the mountain. Cascade eruptions in recorded history, and in native oral history before that, only talk about explosive-type eruptions like that of Mt. St. Helens in 1980, but Cascade volcanoes are often surrounded by old lava flows, reminding us they can erupt other ways if they want to. (To any volcanoes reading this: Your kind and generous offer to arrange a demonstration is truly appreciated, but is not strictly necessary at this time. Thanks!)
So the lava erupted from a vent on the east side of Mt. Hood, and flowed east and downhill until it came up against Bluegrass Ridge. This is the north-south ridge that runs for several miles on the east side of Mt. Hood, completely not aligned with Mt. Hood for the simple reason that it's older (I've seen numbers putting it at ~3m years old versus no greater than 1.3m for Mt. Hood) It's also a few hundred feet too tall for anything flowing down from Mt. Hood to just flow over the top, so the other options are to flow around the obstacle if possible, or stop and pile up if not. Water finds a way back to the sea. Lava dreams of that, but flows a bit and piles up a bit and eventually solidifies in place. Some of the lava flowed north, parallel to Bluegrass Ridge, until it could flow around the ridge and continue downhill from there, and finally froze in place at some point, well short of the Pacific Ocean. The regular climate resumed after that event, and water from the mountain still needed a way around the ridge, which led to present-day Cold Spring Creek. This is not necessarily the same exact channel as the lava earlier, or any water channel that might have been here before the lava came, but same basic idea. And then the (usually) slow magic of water plus time took over, and the creek has been eroding its way downward and backwards, and Tamanawas Falls is the slowly moving point where that ongoing process is at right now.
(But don't just take my word for it. Here's a 1997 USGS report, Geologic History of Mount Hood Volcano, Oregon. A Field-Trip Guidebook, which was created for a 1996 geology conference in Portland as a fun driving tour if you're in town for an extra day or two. Pages 22-23 cover the area along OR 35 near the falls.)
History
Depending on who you believe and what the current best evidence says, it's an outside possibility there may have been people here when all that happened. Though current conventional wisdom holds that people have been here for around half that time, with the caveat that ice age floods would have buried or erased a lot of evidence. That's still around 15000 years, which is long enough that it's safe to assume the whole region was thoroughly scouted for useful waterfalls, meaning the ones that migrating fish have a decent chance of leaping over. Tamanawas Falls is clearly too tall for that; the only traditional fishing site I know of in the Hood River watershed is at Punchbowl Falls over on the West Fork of the river.
Beyond that, I have no idea whether this was a significant place for anyone before recorded history. A 1977 Forest Service planning doc for the agency's Mt. Hood Planning Unit (which seems to coincide with the whole Mt. Hood National Forest) tried to inventory all "cultural resources" in the area, and came up with precisely nothing before the pioneer era. And the only maybe-pioneer-era thing they had for Tamanawas Falls was an item for "Initialed Trees", of some unknown age. It does not say exactly where the Initialed Trees were, or even what the initials were, and there aren't any signs along the trail pointing out where one might find said Initialed Trees. Which is fine; quite honestly I don't suppose there's any way to showcase historical graffiti without some percentage of visitors thinking they have permission to add to the collection. If you need a protip about that: First I have to tell you not to carve your initials in trees, because it's bad for the trees. But if you absolutely positively must carve something in a tree, be sure to include today's date and time, and some sort of unique ID (Legal name and address, Instagram or TikTok or YouTube @name, Social Security number, or whatever). Just some sort of ID that future historians of the year 2225 can cross-reference in the archives and pull up your vital records and complete browser history, including the supposedly incognito parts, so a sign next to the tree can include an accurate biography of you. But hey, that's immortality for ya: You can maybe influence whether people of the future have heard of you, but you can't control what they think of you.
I should point out that the Forest Service did not actually consult local tribes for that 1977 study, because 1977. Which is how you get things like a 2008 incident where an ODOT road crew damaged a sacred site named Ana Kwna Nchi Nchi Patat after not realizing what it was. The site happened to be right next to US 26 and was impacted when they added a turn lane to the road. The Forest Service finally agreed to restore the site in 2023.
I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that the odds are extremely low that the very first person to see the falls was a white guy with a camera. The reason I say that is that sometime between 1895 and 1909, photographer Benjamin A. Gifford (1859–1936) took this photo of the falls, eventually publishing it in his 1909 photo book Art Work of the State of Oregon, currently on Amazon for a mere $895.00. He isn't credited with discovering the falls -- he must have already had an inkling that the falls existed before bushwhacking up Cold Spring Creek lugging a heavy large-format camera. But it also wasn't a well-known destination back then, since it apparently didn't have a name when he took the photo and it ended up being called "Giffords Falls" for a while in the early part of the 20th Century. This burst of fresh attention did not, however, result in a trail to the falls right away, and it spent much of the 20th Century as a known and named but rarely visited mystery spot deep in the forest.
The only use of the old name I've come across in local newspaper archives is an Oregon Journal article from September 1907. The article itself is fairly dry, concerning various recent and proposed improvements in Oregon canals and railroads, including the never-completed railroad loop around Mt. Hood. The article is illustrated with a variety of photos from around the state with some vague connection to the text, including one that's definitely the falls here, labeled "Gifford Falls, Base of Mt. Hood". I think they used it on the idea that the creek flows into the E. Fork of Hood River, which powers the hydro plant at Dee, OR, which powers the city of Hood River and may power the proposed railroad someday, plus the falls themselves might be a scenic destination for tourists on the proposed railroad someday. I don't see any photo credits listed for the image, so for all we know the newspaper's one and only depiction of "Gifford Falls" might be illustrated with someone else's photo.
And with that, the falls fell off the radar again until the 1960s. Sometime along this time period it picked up the name "Tamanawas", but I don't know when. Official maps of the Mt. Hood National Forest (updated every few years) showed nothing here thru the 1952 edition, while the 1963 map shows the falls, but no trail or trailhead, and it's labeled using "Tamanawaus", the old spelling. You might have been able to get a look at the falls from above at this point, as the Elk Meadows trail now passed by the general vicinity of the falls and connected to a forest road labeled "S230", which would have to be present day NF-3510-620. (not a typo: the NF-3520-620 I mentioned runs just south of here, and it looks like it was road S229 under the old numbering scheme in effect back then).
If you google the place now, you'll encounter an internet factoid claiming that the name was changed from "Giffords" to "Tamanawas" in 1971, but that's not quite what really happened; I found an Oregon Journal article about the renaming (and a few others), dated December 4th, 1971, and it briefly explains what actually happened. Listed among various decisions by the state geographic names board, the article says "Spelling of Tamanawaus Falls on Clear Creek in the Hood River drainage was changed to Tamanawas to make it phonetically in keeping with the Indian language." So the immediately previous name was basically the current one but spelled wrong.
I was kind of hoping that the old spelling would lead me to more vintage news articles, but no such luck. The only other use of that spelling in local papers was a mistaken use of the old spelling in a 1982 article, over a decade after the experts officially fixed it.
The 1972 map has the falls under the current name, spelled correctly this time, and it now shows the trail too. The trail isn't numbered, though, so it might have been new, or that corner of the map was just too cluttered to add a trail number. I thought that narrowed it down to a six year window for roughly when the trail came about, but then I found a 1964 USGS map showing the falls and trail and labeling it "Tamanawaus", and that's the oldest 1:25000 map of the area available on the USGS site. While lower resolution maps as late as 1978 don't mention it.
The trail appears in Don and Roberta Lowe's 70 Hiking Trails: Northern Oregon Cascades (1974), but it wasn't mentioned in local newspapers until 1978, in an Oregonian article on fun fall activities around Mt. Hood. It also got a mention a Roberta Lowe column in a November 1978 Oregon Journal column full of factoids about trail history. She tells us most of the trail was built by volunteers, but Forest Service experts were called in to blast a way through the big boulder field toward the end, since the agency generally doesn't let volunteers go around dynamiting stuff on federal land. You might think that would go without saying, but it was the 1970s, and you could get away with a lot in those days if you told people that you had done this before and looked like you knew what you were doing. So this "no amateur demolition work" rule might have been a new policy at the time. And she doesn't actually say when this trail construction had happened. It sounds recent, but the rest of article hops around between the first trails on Mt. Hood going in around 1908, and recent work to reopen the Mt. Defiance trail by building a path from Starvation Creek to the old trail -- which used to start at the little state park at Lindsey Creek, now bypassed by I-84. Anyway, mentions of the place seemed to pick up a bit after 1978, and it started appearing in Mazamas hike announcements afterward.
Which is not to say the area wasn't getting the usual Forest Service treatment. On aerial photos it's not hard to see the patchwork pattern that comes from decades of Forest Service timber sales. I couldn't find anything in the newspapers about timber sales near the newly minted trail, so I checked HistoricAerials, which has 1981 and 1994 imagery for the area. The 1981 photo just shows unbroken forest to the south of the falls and trail, while the 1994 edition has a patchwork of clearcuts centered on forest road 3520-620. Until quite recently the forest near the falls was threatened by the proposed Polallie-Cooper timber sale project just north of here, which the Forest Service has been trying to push through since the mid-2000s.
Speaking of clearcuts, I was a bit surprised to realize how little protection the area around the falls actually has. The creek has been proposed as a future "Wild and Scenic" waterway but doesn't currently have that status, though it flows into the East Fork of Hood River, which does. The falls are also juuust outside the Mt. Hood Wilderness boundary, as the area was proposed but excluded during Congressional horse trading in 2009. Instead the falls are part of the ~13,000 acre "Mt. Hood Additions Roadless Area". "Roadless Area" indicates -- as you might expect -- a lower level of protection than "Wilderness" does. Frankly it's more of a description than a protection measure. It doesn't actually ban logging or other development within the designated area. It doesn't even ban roads; a Forest Service explainer gamely argues that "roadless" means "less roads", not "no roads" or even "no new roads". That isn't what "roadless" usually means to the general public, though, and so they're forever putting out new proposals to clearcut a roadless area and always seem shocked and bewildered every time they're sued over it. In a similar vein, the falls are also included in the 82,385.47 acre "Mount Hood Park Division", as designated by the US Secretary of Agriculture way back on April 28th, 1926. (A 16,762.97 acre "Columbia Gorge Park Division" to the north of here was created around the same time.) The "Park Division" designation suggests it's managed for nature and recreation along the lines of a national park but run by the forest service, and a lot of contemporary news accounts from that period act like that was the case. But again, "Park Division" was more of a description than a protected area, and it seems as though the Forest Service eventually allowed these designations to fall by the wayside.
Footnote(s)
[1] The more that I look at the map, that road might be useful as part of a loop hike: After visiting the falls, take the Tamanawas Tie trail #650B up to the Elk Meadows Trail #645, follow that to where it intersects the Bluegrass Ridge Trail #647, and after a short distance bushwhack over to road 3520-620. Go downhill/south on the road, and cut over to the East Fork Trail #650 at the point where the trail and road run together for a bit, and take the #650 north back to the trailhead. There's also a point where the road and trail pass about 100' feet from each other, as the crow flies, and maybe that would work as a connector and maybe it wouldn't, I haven't actually tried this yet and don't know what it's like in the real world. But the interwebs version looks kind of interesting. Maybe I just have a bias in favor of reusing old forest roads; it's mostly that there are a truly mind-boggling number of them out there in the forest, and the Forest Service is never going to have enough money to either decommission old roads properly, or to build and maintain any more trails beyond what currently exists, so if an old road goes somewhere interesting, the pragmatic thing would be to not turn up our noses at using it. Also old forest roads are wider than the average trail, which miiight help avoid being swarmed by ticks during the height of tick season.
[2] 1995 Preliminary Geologic Map of the Mount Hood 30- By 60-Minute Quadrangle, Northern Cascade Range, Oregon has a date of around 1.8 million years, from a location on the west side of Bluegrass Ridge, if I understand their latitude-longitude format correctly. The PDF describes the contents of the map but doesn't include the map, which I haven't located yet.
[3] As for the rest of the article: It was titled "'Cleanup' of Names Protested By Board" Which is and isn't what readers of the distant year 2025 might think. The State Board on Geographic Names was upset. "Outrageous, this cleansing program of the federal agencies", said the director of the Oregon Historical Society. "A colorful part of the West could be lost if this continues", said a board member. But they weren't talking about place names containing racial slurs, or names honoring Confederate generals, or notorious soldiers from the Indian Wars, or anything like that. No, it seems that a few years earlier the Bureau of Land Management had looked at their map of Steens Mountain, in a remote part of SE Oregon, and saw the name "Whorehouse Meadow" and got a case of the vapors. It seems the name dates back to the Old West, named for the only business that has ever existed there or for miles around in any direction, and then only seasonally, and -- according to historians who study these things -- it was more of a gussied-up stagecoach than an actual house. The agency quietly changed it to "Naughty Girl Meadow", a name that invites at least as much curiosity as the original. That finally caught the notice of the state board in 1971, though I gather the original name wasn't officially restored until the early 80s.
In related news, the board concluded the name "Hells Canyon" was not offensive and should be the official name, rather than "Grand Canyon of the Snake". Also, "Moloch Beach" on the coast became "Moolach" since it was intended to be a Chinook word for "elk", not anything biblical, but someone had spelled it wrong somewhere along the way and it got stuck that way for a while. The name has since been further corrected to "Moolack", I guess to be even less Moloch-y. And in another bit of typo repair, "Bagsby Hot Springs" was officially changed to the correct "Bagby".
[4] In a situation familiar to photographers across the ages, Gifford sued the Ford Motor Company in 1916 for using one of his photos in a company publication without permission or credit. He won the case and was awarded $250 (which is about $7200 in 2024 dollars) plus attorney fees.
Gifford (but not the falls) was mentioned in 1972 article of oldtimer reminiscences. It seems the Giffords owned a raspberry patch near Salmon Creek in the 1920s, near (and now in) Vancouver, WA, where the author and her husband first met while picking berries at age 11.
[5] Two papers came back after checking JSTOR a few different ways:
Printzen, Christian, and Tor Tønsberg. “The Lichen Genus Biatora in Northwestern North America.” The Bryologist, vol. 102, no. 4, 1999, pp. 692–713. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3244256. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.
German and Norwegian lichen taxonomists visit the Pacific Northwest to study an inconspicuous lichen genus, announce four new species. A passage describes what they're studying and why this is good place to do it:
"the genus comprises crustose lichens with green algal photobionts, biatorine apothecia, colorless, simple to 3-septate ascospores, and bacilliform pycnospores. Biatora is widely distributed in the Northern Hemisphere, but the extra-European taxa have not received any systematic treatment. The diversity is obviously highest in temperate and boreal coniferous forest."
And you're hearing about this now because a specimen of Biatora nobilis, one of the newly-described species, was collected from a conifer tree somehere along the Tamanawas Falls trail. The type specimen was collected up on Vancouver Island, so this isn't a situation like one of those weird insects that only lives around the base of a few Gorge waterfalls and nowhere else. Common but inconspicuous, and tough to tell different species apart, and there are not a lot of taxonomists out there period much less ones specializing in lichens, and there are big swaths of the biological world where nobody has gone through and done the detailed taxonomy work. Lichens are a weird specialty because a lichen is a symbiosis between a fungus species and an algae species. I actually knew that part already, but I didn't think about how that complicates putting them in categories. At present they're classified by (and named the same as) the base fungus species in the pairing, but this is an ongoing controversy. You can get lichens that seem completely unrelated by swapping out the alga species, yet they're all counted as the same because the fungus is the same. I dunno, you may not find that very interesting. But it's a thing I just learned today and I wanted to tell you about it.
Secondly, a specimen of the stonefly Taenionema kincaidi that was collected further up Cold Spring Creek was examined in:
Stanger, Jean A., and Richard W. Baumann. “A Revision of the Stonefly Genus Taenionema (Plecoptera: Taeniopterygidae).” Transactions of the American Entomological Society (1890-), vol. 119, no. 3, 1993, pp. 171–229. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25078571. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.[6] Vintage USFS maps of the Mt. Hood area from 1921, 1936, 1939, and 1946, 1952 and 1966 don't show the falls, or the trail to the falls, or the trailhead. They generally do show the Bluegrass Ridge and Elk Meadow trails, and a lot of the campgrounds in the area existed that far back, just not anything here.
Likewise, a vintage brochure "Forest Trails and Highways of the Mount Hood Region" (1920) covers a lot of the scenic highlights of the region, including the Gorge, and doesn't say a word about Tamanawas Falls. A 1939 brochure "Trails on Slopes of Mount Hood" comes with a detailed map and doesn't show the waterfall here, while including a variety of others, all smaller than Tamanawas, and a 1961 reissue of the same guide shows even more trails but not one to the base of the falls. A state highway department publication, "Oregon scenic highway drive: Mt. Hood Loop" has an exhaustive log of sights to be found along the route and doesn't mention the falls, and it's dated 1981 (though it looks like a reprint of a much older guide.)
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