Punchbowl Falls, West Fork Hood River

Our next adventure takes us out to Hood River again, and then a surprisingly long drive south through farm country to Punchbowl Falls, a rather short but very picturesque waterfall on the West Fork of the Hood River.

Some of you may be confused already: You've been there before, and you know it's on Eagle Creek, and you have the photos and cliff-jumping scars to prove it, and I must be letting AI write my posts now just going by how wrong I am about everything. You will be, or ought to be, relieved to know that there are multiple vaguely punchbowl-esque waterfalls out there, and you're thinking of the much better-known one, the Punch Bowl Falls on, yes, Eagle Creek. And when I say "Eagle Creek", I mean the one in the Gorge, not the other famous Eagle Creek near Estacada, which has waterfalls of its own but no punchbowls. Anyway, they both kinda-sorta look like overflowing punch bowls if you squint just right, I guess. Also -- and this is very important -- observe that the two names are not quite identical: The one south of Hood River is "Punchbowl", one word, while the Eagle Creek one is "Punch Bowl", two words. And no, I don't know of a reliable way to remember that and not get it backwards, and nobody else does either, as any search of the modern interwebs on either name will demonstrate. On top of all that, the two names sound exactly the same when spoken aloud, so you'll have to say "the Eagle Creek one" or "the Hood River one" if there's a chance listeners will be confused.

It's admittedly an unusual naming convention, but at least it's somewhat extensible: Let's suppose that another heretofore-unknown third kinda-sorta-punchbowl-ish waterfall is discovered, way off in some wild remote corner of the state. The obvious logical next step is to call the newcomer "Pun Chb Owl Falls", three words but still pronounced 'punchbowl', except by tourists and anybody else who doesn't know the drill, kind of like what Portland does with "Couch" and "Glisan". And you can support up to nine unique punchbowls this way, ending with "P U N C H B O W L", as in nine single-letter words in a row, separated by spaces, but still pronounced "punchbowl". So far we actually haven't needed all this extra name flexibility, but you never know. And as a side note, we do also have a Punchbowl Canyon Falls, in the south Coast Range near Florence, and we can reuse the naming convention if any more punchbowl-ish canyons turn up. So there's that.

To further confuse things, I came across a couple of old photos of the falls via the History Museum of Hood River County, and they have captions calling it "Devil's Punchbowl". That name probably fell out of use here due to the famous Devil's Punch Bowl on the coast, which is a former sea cave and not a waterfall at all. In that last link the state park department spells "Punchbowl" as one word, but the State Land Inventory System has it as two words.

The Hood River museum also has a vintage postcard claiming to be of the falls here. It calls them "Devil's Punch Bowl", and uses a picture of the Eagle Creek falls, and says the West Fork falls are on the Mt. Hood Highway (aka OR 35), which is not actually true either; instead you want the Dee Highway (OR 281) which technically does connect to OR 35 eventually but it's a long way out of your way. A previous owner of the postcard (before the museum owned it) scrawled "very wrong" in pencil on the front of the card.

And while we're at it, Martin Falls -- a 342' seasonal waterfall near Grand Coulee Dam -- also sometimes goes by "Devil's Punchbowl". I don't have any fun stories about this one, though, so this is going to be a fairly short paragraph.

Looking at the bigger picture, the USGS Geographic Names map lists 81 Devils-something-or-others just in Oregon, and just counting the officially-official, federally-approved ones. Which is enough to have its own OregonHikers thread. Curry County on the South Coast is home to three separate Devils Backbones, which seems excessive if you ask me. I think my favorite on the list has to be Devils Ball Diamond, located off Highway 31 in Eastern Oregon and looks (to me, anyway) a lot like Hole-in-the-Ground, a maar (a pit formed by an ancient volcanic steam explosion) about 15 miles to the north of there, and a place we visited wayyyy back in 2007.

As an aside, it does kind of surprise me that this isn't an active Christian conservative grievance, complaining bitterly that all the place names with their favorite racial slurs are being renamed and the Devil ones aren't. My only thought there is that they know they might actually win that one, I mean, even I would be inclined to agree with that, but what they actually want is to either bring back all the old slurs, or just stay mad about it forever, which drives fundraising. It may be just as well that this isn't on their radar at the current moment, because they would probably insist on changing all the 'Devil' names to themes connected to the current US president, and then we'd be arguing over whether it's "Mar-a-Lago Punchbowl" or "Mar-a-Lago Punch Bowl" and we're right back at square one again, but this time with debaters who are mostly sub-literate and heavily armed.

This whole situation could be a lot worse, just so you know. Back before Disney bought the Star Wars® universe, there was a whole "Expanded Universe" of novels and comic books of widely varying quality that were roughly based on the original films. To the dismay of harcore fans, Disney abruptly declared all of that stuff to be "Legends" and not exactly canonical, mostly to avoid paying various authors (because Hollywood), but also partly to avoid being painted into various dumb plot corners forever. It seems that at one point a nefarious bad guy decided to clone Luke Skywalker, in furtherance of various nefarious plans, using DNA from the hand Luke lost track of in Empire Strikes Back. Obviously the clone needed a name, and so Luuke Skywalker (with two U's) was, er, born. And that naturally led to Luuuke Skywalker, (three U's) and frankly I was never into the books and I have no idea how far they eventually ran with this naming scheme, but for a while I gather you had to count the 'u's pretty religiously just to keep track of who was talking. A bit of friendly advice: Do not even consider naming your children this way, no matter how big of a Star Wars® nerd you are.

Anyway, the falls here are part of a Hood River County Park of quite recent vintage, having opened to the public in 2016, per the Portland Monthly and Thrive Hood River articles and a Wyeast Blog post about the new park.

The only non-recent Oregonian news story I could find about this place was a brief mention in a September 1933 fishing report. It seems the river was full of salmon just then and chinook and steelhead could be seen leaping the falls. Note this was a few years before Bonneville Dam went in, so fish back then still had a basically unimpeded path from the ocean to here, and your mileage may vary widely if you go now.

The rickety stairs into the canyon across the river, and the spooky-looking tunnels next to the falls, are there as part of either a fish ladder/hatchery facility, or some sort of small PacifiCorp hydropower facility, or possibly both, or maybe a secret government facility masquerading as one or the other or both. I haven't seen a good explanation of exactly what was here when all of that stuff was built and what it was all for, and I'm certainly not about to try my hand at those stairs to get a better look. That's left as an exercise for the reader, and feel free to have a go at it if you want to. I mean, obviously all the standard disclaimers apply, Legal says to tell you "Don't even think about it", and common sense dictates that it's a terrible idea, and you should realize that instantly without anyone telling you, etc. But let's be honest: Telling people not to be idiots rarely works on the people who need to hear it, namely idiots. Maybe that would work if this was a different planet, and we were a different species, in a different timeline. I think I've said before that the key advantage of humans having language and living in groups is that you can learn important survival facts like what tasty-looking fruits and root vegetables to avoid, and why not to pick up snakes or hug sharks or startle a mule while standing right behind it, and you can learn this stuff for free, at zero cost to yourself, after it happens to some other idiot. But no, some people are only ever going to learn things the old-fashioned way. I just don't want their equally dumb next of kin trying to sue me afterward for failing to talk them out of it.

I say all that because Punch Bowl and Punchbowl Falls are both fairly close to Hood River, a place that likes to think of itself as the world capital of XTREME® sports of all kinds, and frankly it wouldn't surprise me a lot if someone eventually decided to try a parkour run on the stairs here, and might even succeed if they've lived here long enough, and actually it's the clumsy copycats from out of town who try to repeat the feat after seeing it on TikTok who will eventually ruin it for everyone. And in any event the internet's full of endless videos of people doing various XTREME® sports at both waterfalls, and here are a few of them, and let's just agree they're here strictly as examples of things to absolutely not do:

• Two clips of people cliff jumping here, and one over at Eagle Creek The not-very-encylcopedic list at iCliffDive.com (which is a website that exists) gets the two waterfalls confused just like everyone else does, and only talks about the Eagle Creek one but with the Hood River name & location. I frankly don't think any of these places look very safe, but if I had to pick one, yeah, I'm taking the Eagle Creek one.
• Kayaking over the falls here, and at Eagle Creek. One of these, I forget which, was (and may still be) accompanied by a YouTube ad for a TripAdvisor page titled "Punchbowl Waterfall - All You Need To Know BEFORE You Go", featuring a stock photo of Niagara Falls (the famous New York one, not the Oregon one). Naturally that link goes to their page about the Eagle Creek waterfall.
• Rafting over the falls here. Content warning on this one: The raft tips over and dumps someone in the water at the base of the falls, and they take ages to pop back up, but they eventually do and they're ok. I haven't found an Eagle Creek equivalent for this one, but I'm fairly sure I've heard of people doing it.
• For rafting and probably kayaking too, the falls here have one advantage over Eagle Creek in that there's a USGS water monitoring station some distance downstream, after the confluence with the East Fork, and it has close to real time flow numbers in cubic feet per second, so at least you can get an accurate idea of what you're getting into before taking the plunge, so to speak. I'm writing this in late August and the current volume is around 215 ft^3/s, which is low but not the record low for the day, which is just 160. The median value for the day is around 311, and the record high for the day is 1150, which seems like a huge number, but the all-time record goes back to the floods of December 22nd 1964, when a whopping 33200 ft^3/s flowed through here, a full 154x as much water as is there right now.
• Salmon leaping the falls here. Which is really only an XTREME® sport if you're a salmon.

HCRH Milepost 72

Here are a few photos of HCRH Milepost 72, which -- as I mentioned in the previous milepost post -- is cleverly concealed just inside the east entrance to the Mosier Twin Tunnels. This has got to be the most unusual location of any of the mileposts I've seen, and I've seen quite a few of them. Strictly speaking this one is probably not one of the handful of originals that survived from 1916; the tunnel was filled with rocks and concrete and sealed off in the late 1950s, and if I had to guess, chances are the original was lost around that time, and then recreated when they restored this section of road in the late 1990s.

Nearby points of interest include, well, the tunnel it's inside of, for one thing. Which is a whole separate post I probably ought to finish sooner rather than later. Further west, in the gap I don't have photos from yet, apparently there's an HCRH Trail viewpoint right at the Hood River-Wasco county line and at least one seasonal waterfall right next to the old road, though I'm not sure where the latter is located exactly. There's also the Hatfield East trailhead itself, and a parking lot for the trailhead a short distance down the road from there. The parking area looks out over a rather stark, barren lava flow area that serves as a large ODOT rock quarry, and if you visit in the spring you miight be able to see Lelliot Falls (Mosier's second-most-famous waterfall, after Mosier Creek Falls) somewhere across the valley in that general direction. Though I've never come across any actual photos of it, so maybe it doesn't flow very often, or maybe it's just not very impressive in person, I dunno.

Due north of the tunnel (and milepost 72) and skipping over Interstate 84 (which doesn't count as a point of interest, sorry) there's a ~10 acre rocky island in the Columbia River, a short distance offshore, officially known as Eighteenmile Island and unofficially as Chicken Charlie's Island, though the origin of that name is not entirely clear; it was owned by a local eccentric named Charlie Reither from 1915-1963, but apparently he never actually had chickens there. The next owners replaced Chicken Charlie's shack with a groovy modern house in 1969. It sold in December 2025 for $1.675M after being on the market for several years; unfortunately the Zillow page for the house (and island) only has aerial photos of the place, because who wouldn't be curious about what it's like inside? The Zillow page also gives the legal address as simply "18 Mile Is., Mosier, OR 97040". Which is kind of neat, though it probably breaks a lot of online shopping sites that assume the 18 is an address on a street named "Mile Island", which is probably some kind of traffic island and not the real deal, and all things considered it's probably simpler to just get a P.O. Box and use that instead. For more info on the island, check out these two pages at the Hood River History Museum plus one page from the local public utility district (for whatever reason).

Wailua Falls, Maui

Here are a few photos of Maui's Wailua Falls, along the Hana Highway at the far eastern end of the island, just past milepost 45. This seems to be one of the more popular waterfalls along the highway, despite being out toward the far end of the road, past the town of Hana itself; it's taller than average, somewhere between 80 and 95 feet high, depending on who you ask, plus there's an actual parking lot here, instead of just parking along the shoulder and hoping positive vibes and a general spirit of aloha will keep you from getting run over. I mean, that's usually enough, but there's always a chance you'll encounter that one guy from some uptight East Coast state who's too busy on his phone screaming at his stockbroker to notice people in the road, and his expensive lawyers will try to blame the state for calling this little 1.1 lane road a state highway, leading him to drive as if it was a proper 4 to 8 lane highway like the ones back home, therefore it's not actually his fault. Or something like that, I'm not a lawyer. But I digress.

This is probably something nobody besides me worries about, but I was curious who actually owns the land around the falls here. Maui County's GIS map says the state government owns it, but doesn't specify which agency. The detailed property record for it also just says "State of Hawaii". It's not a state park, and is also not part of the state forest reserve system, but beyond that I'm not really sure, and I don't recall there being any signs around the falls that would clear this up either, and it's all weirdly kind of vague, but maybe it's not a problem in practice, I dunno.

For actual useful info about the falls, you might try its World of Waterfalls page, or this Medium post about a recent visit, or a Pride of Maui guide to waterfalls around the island.

Fern Hill Forest

Next up, here are a few photos from Metro's super-obscure Fern Hill Forest Natural Area, in rural Washington County, Oregon, a few miles south of Forest Grove. It's more or less across the street from the Penstemon Prairie Natural Area we visited a while back, and not far from the shiny new Chehalem Ridge Nature Park. (Despite the very similar names this is not the same place as the nearby Fernhill Wetlands, Forest Grove's wastewater treatment complex slash nature area, which is a very popular birdwatching spot and allegedly much less stinky than you might expect, though birders always say that.)

I parked right about here, on the wide shoulder off SW Fern Hill Road, and wandered into the park for a while. The place doesn't seem to have any trails of any significance; part of the whole idea of Metro natural areas is that they don't add infrastructure to places after buying them, beyond a couple of tiny signs confirming they own the place. Metro does like to buy chunks of private timberland after they've been replanted (and the owner decides they don't want to wait another 30 years to make their money back), so that's usually how a natural area gets airquote-trails, but that doesn't seem to have happened here. Or at least I didn't see any, and I don't see anything that looks like an old road or hidden trail on the state LIDAR map, and while I was looking I quickly noticed there were quite a few stinging nettles around here. So it wasn't long before I shrugged and headed off to the next adventure.

There isn't a whole lot out there on the interwebs that I can tell you about the place either. Here's what I've got:

• The only relevant news item I've encountered is a brief mention in a 2014 story about a Metro Council visit to Forest Grove. The article just notes that the place exists and doesn't elaborate.
• Metro's 2020 Chehalem Ridge Master Plan mentions Fern Hill briefly:
  

  Fern Hill Forest is adjacent to Penstemon Prairie to the southeast, and it protects a steep forested hillside and a key potential habitat connection between Chehalem and the complex of protected wetlands along the Tualatin River.

  
  Which is a long way of saying it's between two areas they're interested in protecting, and keeping it natural here might help with that. The creeks that flow through here do seem to end up over on the Penstemon Prairie side of the street, so I would imagine that's the main point of this place.
• A 2025 pdf from a regional trails planning effort includes Fern Hill Forest in a table of westside Metro natural areas, as part of a larger section on improving maps of the region. It does tell us the natural area comes to 262 acres but has no further useful info about it, not even the year it was established, and the comment column of the table just says "No info available", and indicates it wasn't on the old map they were updating, and also wouldn't be on the updated new map, unlike most of the other natural areas nearby.
• Metro's records site has an entry for a "Fern Hill Forest Natural Area Site Conservation Plan", indicating there's a plan for the place, but the actual document isn't online, and I haven't gone to the trouble of doing a public records request. The next few items indicate there's more to the plan than just benignly neglecting the place.
• A March 2026 Metro budget doc for fiscal year 2025-26 lists a couple of Fern Hill Forest budget items, both of them carried over from previous years: $271k for "LR147 Fern Hill Forest Stream & Savana Restoration", and $270k for "LR155 Fern Hill Forest Stream Restoration".
• A ConstructConnect page for a project titled "Fern Hill Forest Stream Restoration - LR155 - Oregon Metro" that was up for competitive bids in early 2025 and underway as of October. (The photos you see here were from before that, because of my chronic inability to get posts researched and written in anything like a timely manner). The page says of the project "A detailed Scope has not yet been determined. As of May 5, 2025, this project is included in the county's 2025-2029 Capital Improvement Program (CIP)".
• A recent Oregonian data project indicated Metro does use glyphosphate herbicides here, using 1.2 gallons in 2022, the most recent year they had records for. That's probably for taking out invasive plants, if I had to guess.
• And most frustratingly, I came across a few search breadcrumbs indicating there's a video somewhere on Facebook (ugh) involving a Metro restoration expert encountering a baby porcupine here. But I can't find it. I went so far as to actually log in over there and try to search that way, but FB search has always been useless and now is no exception. Which is really annoying, because baby porcupines are adorable, and I can't imagine anyone would rather watch bottom-feeding AI slop than real baby porcupines, but that's how the algorithm's coded, so that's what FB is going to show you, instead of the thing you actually searched for. Yuck.