Upper Rock Creek Falls

For our next adventure, we're paying a visit to Skamania County's amazing Upper Rock Creek Falls, right on the outskirts of Stevenson, Washington. I am not exaggerating when I tell you this is one of the scenic highlights of the entire Gorge, and yet the big guidebooks and tourist info sites all seem to ignore it, local tourism folks included. I think the main reason for this is that up until quite recently the falls here were surrounded by private property and there was no way to even get a glimpse of them without trespassing. After the interwebs came along, word got out about the falls to a very limited degree, along with a set of highly sketchy instructions on how to get there. My IG post about the falls described the problems with this route:

Maybe 10-15 years ago the internet briefly discovered the place, via a route on the other side of the creek that involved sneaking through a cemetery, avoiding angry locals, and then scrambling down a steep landslide-prone 100' bluff, and then climbing back up, and being sneaky again, and hoping your car wasn't towed or torched in the meantime. It slowly dawned on people that no part of this route was in any way public property, at which point a lot of local outdoor-adjacent websites marked it as off-limits and removed any info on how to get there, and the place was effectively memory-holed.

We are not following those instructions today. It turns out that for the entire time this was going on, there was another route on the other side of the creek that was apparently known to locals and nobody else. This route was also private land up until quite recently, but apparently passing through was tolerated, maybe in exchange for not telling outsiders about the place, but that last bit is just me speculating. Then in 2022, Skamania County quietly bought close to 11 acres (in three tax lots ) near the falls so now it's public land the whole way to the falls. Those links go to the Skamania County Assessor pages for these properties, for any skeptics out there who think it's still private; you can go check for yourself and do not need to trust me about this.

So with that preamble, the correct way to visit the falls is as follows: Go to the intersection of Ryan-Allen Road and Aalvik Road, here. There's a wide bit of shoulder just west of the intersection, with room for maybe 3-4 cars, and you can park there. There's a red fire hydrant right at the intersection, and you'll see an unsigned but obvious gravel trail starting to the left of the hydrant. Take this trail. After a while you'll go thru a powerline corridor with another trail thru it. Going straight takes you to the Upper Falls, while heading off to the left takes you toward the Lower Falls, and I'll talk about the Lower Falls a bit later, although I didn't visit them on this trip and have no photos to share. Note that there are a couple of sections of stairs to watch out for, and right at the end there's a steep bank to scramble down. Just something to keep in mind, especially if you're on a bike, or you have small children or maybe over-excitable dogs in tow.

The one and only historical item I've found about the place is a June 1927 tourism ad by local Skamania County boosters with a photo of the falls, promoting the county as the Vacationists' Paradise, now easily accessible via the shiny new Bridge of the Gods. Full of trout streams, hiking trails, and hot springs resorts.

Oh, and back in 1896 there was also a brief gold rush on Rock Creek that was initially reported to be here (which is how I came to read about it), but turned out to be happening deep in the forest 20 miles upstream of here. So it wasn't an event at the falls, per se, but I only realized that after digging up a bunch of links about it (so to speak), and c'mon, gold rush stuff is always fun, so I kicked it down to the footnote area instead of just deleting it.

One bit of photo advice: The stretch of creek around the falls faces roughly east, so as the afternoon rolls on it's harder and harder to keep the sun out of the frame, and you might be better off visiting in the early morning. I'm not a big morning person, and if you aren't one either there are some decent hotel options in the area. The well-known local golf & destination wedding resort was not a great fit for us, but a lot of people seem to like it.

So you might have seen the "Upper" in the name and now you're wondering about the Lower Falls. The short answer is that it really depends on when you read this. Back in 2007 there was a huge, slow-moving, unstoppable landslide starting in February of that year. Here's a March 2007 Oregonian profile of an elderly neighbor whose house was slowly being torn apart by the slide.

Some striking AP wire photos from May 12th: Another homeowner had tried to move his house back away from the unstable slope, but didn't move it back quite far enough to avoid the massive slide damaging his house beyond repair. They ended up burning the house as practice for the local fire department, which is not that unusual in situations like this. The twist here is that the homeowner was a firefighter in the department, and participated in burning down his own house for work. There's a photo of him watching that could be the dictionary definition of "mixed emotions".

After things settled down a bit, word got out in the regional outdoor community that the lower falls were gone forever, destroyed by the massive landslide. But things erode quickly around here, and 2007 was almost two decades ago, and apparently they've more-or-less returned to a state resembling the pre-slide falls. I mean, I don't have before-and-after photos to compare, but current Google Maps imagery indicates there's a tall waterfall there again.

It turns out this is not even the first time this has happened. Here's a small December 1921 news item titled "Flood Destroys Falls", which actually undersells the scale of what happened. The lower falls were buried by debris and all infrastructure downstream was destroyed and washed away, including an entire hydroelectric plant, which was never rebuilt. A 1956 map of the area shows the dam site still owned by the local public utility district at that point, though they apparently sold it later. I'm not absolutely sure that the new owner turned around and built a house there, or that said house was one of the houses trashed by the next big slide, but it seems kind of probable, doesn't it? There are no really benign forms of geology happening on human timescales; anything that happens quickly is seen as a disaster, even if nobody dies. And then when geology so much as pauses for a few decades everyone forgets all about it, and it always comes as a huge shock when things inevitably start moving again, wash, rinse, repeat.

So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, from the look of things, I would not bet a penny that 2007 was the last-ever landslide here, which is why I said "it depends" about the Lower Falls. It's there now while I'm writing this, but could be buried in rocks and dirt and once again written off as lost forever by next spring, and could be completely back again by spring 2029. It's anybody's guess really.

So apparently the lower falls and the land between the two falls are also owned by the county, but the only area where you can take photos of it from below isn't public as of late 2024. And Zach Forsyth's waterfall book makes a really great point that photos looking down from the top of a waterfall are almost always a letdown. Often they're just a view of the parking lot, or looking down at a generic chunk of forest, and certainly not worth risking life and limb over. And that chunk of private land is also ground zero for the 2007 landslide, and seems to be zoned to prevent any future structures in that area, I think with the hope that the remaining landowners will eventually get a clue and sell at a price the county can afford. To that end, legend has it that county code enforcement will swoop in and taser you if you so much as snap two Lego bricks together while standing there.

While you're lying there getting tasered and sort of disassociating from the whole mess, you might wonder idly why it's county code enforcement that's tasering you and not someone from the city. To that end, here's a City of Stevenson "critical areas map" from 2018, showing overlapping areas of steep slopes, unstable soils, previous historical landslides, debris hazard areas downstream of known landslide areas, etc., I guess as sort of a guide when figuring out where not to build your dream home. The map also shows that, whether by pure coincidence or incredible foresight slash cynicism, the worst of the hazard area lies juuuust outside city limits, which jog south quite a bit here and just so happen to exclude most of Rock Creek. And as a result of this, the whole Rock Creek landslide situation is strictly a county problem that the city doesn't really have to care about, which is pretty convenient, I'll give them that at least.

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So we've covered historical events for the upper and lower falls, but as for Rock Creek overall the most newsworthy happening came back in the summer of 1896 when the creek was the subject of a bona fide (but rather brief) gold rush. Seriously. Here's how it played out:

• July 30th:

  ONE MORE CRIPPLE CREEK FOUND
  
  Word has been received that there is considerable excitement at Stevenson, the county seat of Skamania County, opposite the upper cascades, on account of the discovery of gold-bearing quartz. In Rock Creek, about 15 miles back from the Columbia. Parties who were fishing on Rock Creek a few days since say Stevenson was practically deserted, all the men having gone up to the mines. Parties from East Portland discovered the vein, and have been exploring and developing it, and have already a considerable quantity of rock “on the dump”. When they have had a milling test made, they will be able to judge of the value of their discovery.

• August 2nd:

  There is no question about the richness of the quartz recently discovered on Rock Creek, near Stevenson, says the Dalles Times-Mountaineer. Thursday, Captain Waud was shown specimens of the ore that were streaked with gold, and that were said to assay from $3000 to $4000 to the ton. The captain says the excitement both at Stevenson and Cascade Locks over the new discovery is intense.

• August 5th, clarifies that the new mining district is 20-25 miles from town, near the origin of the creek near Lookout Mountain. Describes the area as "as inaccessible as could be desired by the most ardent sensationalist". The article continues:

  The ore seems to be rich in gold, silver and copper, and is easy to mine. There has been a number of claims staked out, and the country is full of prospectors, and strikes are reported daily. There are now four tunnels being driven and the ore is showing up better as they go. There is also some placer gold found near by, which is being worked with success. Many new miners are now at Stevenson getting outfits and preparing to go out — mostly from Portland. Pack horses can be obtained at Stevenson, which is the nearest town to the mines.

• August 6th: "Gold Is In Skamania", recaps the heady events of the past week and interviews one F. Woodworth, an experienced longtime prospector, who immediately bailed out of his boring railroad job and headed to the Rock Creek goldfields, immediately staking out some mining claims and grabbing a sample for the nearest assay office. His sample had just come back from the lab that morning, and was valued at a mere $4/ton, but he took that as a sign of success given how little time and effort he had invested so far. He was headed back to Stevenson after being interviewed, and averred that after his many years of searching, he had finally found the Mother Lode, the key to untold riches, for real this time, not like all the other times he thought the same thing and it didn't pan out, so to speak.
• Then on August 16th the worst possible thing happened to the gold country at Rock Creek: Not a mine cave-in, or a dynamite accident, or it turned out the whole thing was a big fraud, or there was a mass outbreak of weapons-grade syphillis, or any of the other kinds of confernal tarnation common to gold rushes. Instead, the news came of massive gold discoveries in the far north of Canada, in the area around Dawson City, Yukon. The Klondike Gold Rush was on -- a gold rush so famous they named an ice cream sandwich after it -- and just like that every gold-addled adventurer in America and across the globe, plus everyone else who made steady money off of prospectors, was off to the Arctic wastes in search of the Mother Lode. Which was definitely, absolutely, positively out there this time, if you just had the good luck or intuition to dig in the right place, and if you didn't find it on the first try, maybe the ten-thousandth try would turn out differently.
• July 1897, a year after the brief mania along Rock Creek, came "Mines of Skamania", an update on the current state of the local industry. It seems partly aimed at the many locals who had run off to Alaska a year earlier and had returned emptyhanded, noting that a fair number of people had found modest-to-moderate quantities of gold all over Skamania County at this point, and you might not get rich but at least a steady-ish income was available, potentially, if you knew what you were doing, and you probably won't freeze solid like poor Sam McGee, or suffer the various other calamities common to the poems of Robert W. Service, and you most likely won't share any of the grim fates of the humans in The Call of the Wild, and then be abandoned by your semi-loyal sled dog, who heads off to run with the wolves. You probably won't even have to turn to crime and then be brought to justice by Sergeant Preston and King the Wonder Dog, and it's equally unlikely you'll find yourself stuck in a lesser John Wayne movie with an earworm soundtrack.
  
  In short, the Skamania Gold Country just didn't offer the same exotic dangers as its northern competitor, so it may be just as well that the local gold rush ended before producing its own poet laureate. It just wouldn't be the same, somehow. Maybe some scary tales about catching hypothermia even though it's 51 degrees because it's a very humid cold; or maybe the sad tale of a lonely miner being ripped apart by an equally amorous but very clumsy sasquatch. I dunno, maybe there's some potential here in the right hands, but to do it now you'd first have to spend half an hour explaining the Rudely Interrupted Gold Rush that Really Happened Nearby, which kind of ruins the mood.
• And because some things never change, there's a semi-related coda from 1910. At this point it was time for a very different kind of land rush, with promoters insisting the former goldfields were perfect as orchard country. This was a common thing around the whole Northwest; there was this idea going around that fruit trees were a license to print money, which would pay for that gracious country estate you've always wanted, with virtually zero manual labor. So essentially the same dream that was sold to a lot of Boomers from the 1970s onward about starting their own wineries: Most of the work is simply sitting around in the golden sunset light and endlessly sampling the finished product, and maybe coming up with a genius-level new food pairing every now and then. Just as a general rule, if someone is trying to sell you any variant of farming that's somehow really easy and also profitable and also 100% legal, and they're trying to sell you on it instead of just doing it themselves, they're trying to pick your pocket.