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 here 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.
And while we're at it, Martin Falls -- a 342' seasonal waterfall near Grand Coulee Dam -- also sometimes goes by "Devil's Punchbowl". And an old picture postcard at the Hood River museum. 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.
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 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 who try to repeat the feat after seeing it on Instagram 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 agree they're just here 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.
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