Seventeen Mile Falls

Since we're in atmospheric river season again, I thought I'd post a few photos of some seasonal waterfalls that are really only visible (or at least visible and worth seeing) this time of year. In the post just before this one, we had a look at "Chicken & Dumplings Falls", nicknamed (by me) after the defunct landmark restaurant across the street. This time around we're a few miles further along the old Columbia River Highway, right around HCRH Milepost 17, but across the road and uphill from there. Again, you can catch a brief glimpse of it while driving by, and strictly speaking you aren't supposed to park along the road here -- although I think the main reason for that is to push you to use the paid parking lot at Dabney State Park right next door. Actually if you look at a map the land containing the waterfall is also part of the park, so if -- hypothetically -- you wanted to get a closer look at it, you at least wouldn't be trespassing if you tried it. It's just that I don't see any trails over there, official or otherwise, or any abandoned roads or railroad grades or whatever, and the whole hillside facing the main section of the park seems to be choked with invasive ivy and blackberry vines, so bushwhacking anywhere near it looks like it'll be a huge hassle.

Still, if we pick reasonable top and base points on the state LIDAR map and subtract one from the other, this one comes to about 165' high counting the two tiers together. So it looks fairly impressive at the times when it's actually running. If we had wetter summers around here, we would probably have an official maintained trail to this one, and Instagram would be full of influencers doing yoga poses in front of it, and it would have a real, official, legal name instead of me just making up names on the fly as needed. But we don't have that kind of climate, and highlighting waterfalls that only run outside of prime tourist season is just going to make visitors unhappy, leading to lots of one star Yelp reviews, and angry letters to the editor demanding that somebody do something about this outrage ASAP, and they probably figured it's just not worth the trouble.