Lower Archer Falls

Next up we're visiting another obscure waterfall on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge. These photos are of Lower Archer Falls, a 50' waterfall hiding juuuust out of plain sight near SR14, roughly halfway between the little towns of Prindle and Skamania. The unmarked trailhead is literally right across SR14 from the US Forest Service's St. Cloud Day Use Area. Which is an old historic apple orchard plus a stretch of rocky, muddy, sandy semi-beach along the Columbia, but that's a whole other blog post I need to finish. So the thing you need to do is park at St. Cloud, make sure your Northwest Forest Pass is somewhere where Officer Friendly can see it, then follow the entrance road back to SR14, and wait for a gap in traffic so you can mosey across. I meant to take a photo of what you're looking for here, as it appears from across the road, but I apparently forgot to do that. Just look for an unmarked but visible trail directly across from the St. Cloud entrance road. You can see it on Street View here, if you'd like a better idea of what to look for.

If the "Lower" qualifier made you wonder about the others: Yes, there is an (Upper) Archer Falls, well upstream of here, 218' high, and part of a restricted area that's permanently closed to all public access, to hopefully protect a number of rare species including the Larch Mountain salamander. It was later realized that the salamander not only existed south of the Columbia River but was much more common there, but the closure was already in effect at that point, and there seems to be a general principle in place to never relax closure rules, period, even if the original rationale behind them turns out to be a bit overstated.

Zach Forsyth's waterfall book also lists a "Middle Archer Falls", maybe 10-20' high and a short distance (as the crow flies) upstream from the lower falls. I don't have any photos of it to show you, because first you have to get above the lower falls, which you do via an absurdly narrow stairway seemingly made of piano keys. Once you're above the lower falls the (unofficial, community-maintained) trail turns east and away from Archer Creek for a bit in order to stay on public land as it continues uphill, and you have to bushwhack back to the creek to find the waterfall. And when I put it that way it hardly sounds worthwhile, but I have this nagging suspicion that I may have to go look for it at some point, and at that point I'll try to explain why it was worth all the extra trouble and why you ought to give it a try too. So there's that to look forward to, I guess. The only other mention I've seen of the middle falls is a brief mention on a Ropewiki page, and even they have no photos of it, or details on how to get to it. A recent PacificNW Hiker video about Lower Archer includes a drone shot that rises above the top of the falls, and you can see what -- from that perspective -- just looks like an upper tier to the lower falls, but it might be Forsyth's middle falls.

Before going I looked at Skamania County GIS to double-check that this is all public land, and then check the Forest Service interactive trail map and see if this is an official trail or not. The answers are a.) yes, and b.) no.

So, a thing I like to do before looking for obscure stuff on the Washington side of the Gorge is fire up the local county GIS system (Skamania County in this case) and double-check that the place I'm interested in -- and the trail to it -- really is public property. This isn't just because I like looking at maps; much of the Washington side is kind of a crazy quilt of state, local, federal, and private land. And then in the 2000s and early 2010s there were a lot of people on the internet posting a lot of cool waterfall photos from places they weren't, strictly speaking, allowed to be, and scored serious Valuable Internet Points in the process, but that was then, and the fact that some hipsters got away with it in 2007 doesn't really hold up in court. In this case, fortunately the answer is yes, the Forest Service owns the whole area we're visiting, having bought it off the Burlington Northern railroad back in 1994.

It's also useful sometimes to pull up the Forest Service's interactive trail map, and if it's an official trail save the relevant area as a pdf in case cell reception is no bueno somewhere. Except that although this is Forest Service land, this isn't a Forest Service trail. Apparently there's a group of dedicated local volunteers that maintains trails in the Archer Mountain area, wayyy uphill from here, so this trail might be their doing. It seems to be an unofficial but longstanding Forest Service policy -- locally, at least -- that if you feel a real calling to do trail construction and maintenance in your spare time, they'll go ahead and let you have a go at it, so long as you do a reasonably professional job of it, and are never a source of bad publicity. I'm sure they can't put that in writing, but it generally seems to work here, and it seems to work for a whole network of forest trails around North Bonneville, a few miles east of here, and it seems to have worked for about a century or so with the web of trails back behind Angels Rest on the Oregon side and the trail up Wind Mountain on the Washington side.

A short distance further upstream just past the Middle(?) falls, the USFS land runs out and the creek passes through a parcel owned by someone or something called "The Lightbearers". The property records don't include an address, but I think that refers to a longstanding new-agey group out of Seattle. And if I have that wrong, it might be a similarly-named fundie group out of Tennessee, or even an evangelical landlord company, or someone else entirely. It frankly sounds like a name you'd adopt if you and a few friends took up LARPing as YA fantasy novel wizards. Or (again, just going by the name) possibly they're a cabal of especially creepy Buffy villains, similar to The Gentlemen. In any event the trail swerves east at that point to avoid the whole thing, whatever it is.

Due to the complicated land ownership situation, a lot of places that would be top destinations on the Oregon side were either private property until fairly recently (like Lower Archer was until 1994), or even now are gated off and inaccessible, like nearby Prindle Falls, which is anywhere between 250' and 435' high depending on who you ask. So over the years, whether people visited a given place or not (and whether it showed up in print anywhere) was kind of a function of whether current landowners were friendly, or alternately how emboldened (or you might say entitled) people felt in visiting without asking. I mention all this because I think it's why I had never heard of Lower Archer (or a lot of the other Washington-side falls) until a few years ago. A lot of this info traditionally got around strictly by word-of-mouth, and putting it in print for strangers to read was a great way to infuriate a landowner who had just about tolerated a few rare visitors who were in the know, and I just never happened to know anyone who knew someone, if you know what I mean.

As a data point, I dug out my stack of old Columbia Gorge hiking and waterfall guidebooks from the late 1960s thru the 1980s, and none of them say anything about waterfalls in the Archer Creek area. Or anywhere else on the Washington side, for that matter, apart from the couple of well-known ones along the Hamilton Mountain trail. And at least some of them had to have known about the others. At the very least someone would have told the Lowes about some of the more obscure places, Another curiosity is that despite all the official hikes and expeditions and whatnot setting off in search of (Upper) Archer Falls over the years, not one historical source -- not a single one -- mentions the lower falls here. You'd think someone would have mentioned it in passing at some point, but no dice.

Anyway, here's a timeline of news about the Archer Creek area. As usual, most of the links go to the Multnomah County Library's local newspaper database, and reading them for yourself requires a library card. Which you should already have anyway if you live here. But if you aren't from around here, your local public or university library miiiight have access to the same scanned papers as part of a nationwide database. The links here still won't work, but you may still be able to find the articles by searching on the topic and the given month and year.

Anyway, here goes:

• Our story begins in the summer of 1901, when a local scientific expedition climbed to the very rim of the gorge and explored the high mountaintops of Archer Mountain and Table Mountain. The party included geologists, photographers, an Oregonian reporter, and even a visiting archeologist from Chicago's Field Museum. Transportation was provided by the steamboat Regulator, which even as late as 1901 was still basically the only connection between this corner of the Washington side of the Gorge and the outside world.

  The expedition proposed to determine the truth or falsity of the "Bridge of the Gods Hypothesis". The present-day version of the idea is that debris from a massive landslide on Table Mountain, on the north side of the river, once completely dammed the river, and once that blockage finally failed, there was still a huge amount of debris in the river here for a long time afterward, so much so that for a while you could cross the river by carefully hopping rock to rock without getting your feet wet. The 1901 version was different, and was what you might call the "Maximal 'Bridge of the Gods' Hypothesis": This idea holds that, once upon a time, a natural rock arch spanned the Columbia. And not a minimal span right there in the narrowest stretch of the river, not a stone version of the present-day bridge. Oh no, they liked to think big in those days, and so imagined a truly stupendous majestic arch connecting the 3417' summit of Table Mountain to some TBD mountaintop on the Oregon side, the closest of which is fully 5 miles to the south.

  For a little context, Wikipedia (and their primary source in this case, the Natural Arch and Bridge Society, which exists) inform us the longest known natural arch in existence today is one in China that's about 400 feet long, so the maximal one here would have been around 66 times longer, had it existed. It turns out the world's longest artificial arch bridge is also in China, and the summit-to-summit bridge here would have exceeded it by a mere factor of 14.

  Frankly the only bridge that comes to mind that even approaches this is the fictional one from Tom Swift and his Repelatron Skyway (1963), in which Tom and the gang rescue a troubled foreign aid project in the friendly African nation of Ngombia, building a modern USA-style freeway across the country's vast impassable malarial swamps via the magic of antigravity. When I read this as a kid, as a hand-me-down childrens book, I wondered why anybody would still need freeways if antigravity was a thing that existed, as the book never bothered to explain that pesky detail.

• Anyway, the adventurers' initial trip report put a brave face on it, but the details tell us the expedition was a big mess. On day 1, the group ascended Archer Mountain without too much chaos, other than the expedition's one and only guide bailing out early due to a foot injury. The party spent a good part of the day ransacking the "Indian mounds" on Archer Mountain looking for artifacts, but didn't find anything of value, before continuing to the summit. Where the photographers were disappointed to find that distant Cascade peaks were obscured by forest fire smoke.
• The trip up Table Mountain the next day was what you might call... under-planned, if you were in a charitable mood. Our brave explorers set out without map or guide, and packed for the hike on the assumption there would be plenty of drinkable water to be had along the way and there was no need to bring a lot of it along. You can probably already guess where this is going. They spent most of the day wandering around lost and thirsty, then ran out of daylight, and spent the night somewhere near the summit without blankets, before eventually finding their way home the next day. Afterward, our conquering heroes told everyone who would listen that the real problem was obviously the mountain, which had turned out to be vastly taller and harder to climb than anyone had known previously. Which, of course, was an important scientific discovery in itself. A follow-up article on the climb quotes one of the explorers as estimating Table Mountain at up to 7000 feet high, roughly even with the tree line on Mount Hood, where in reality it's only about half that height. For some reason I was reminded of the classic SNL sketch where Bill Murray plays an aging, out-of-shape Hercules, making various excuses for his inability to lift a nearby boulder.
• To put this adventure in a wider context, 1901 was also right around the start of what historians call the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, the golden age of fearless leaders like Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackleton, and in fact the latter two were in the early stages of the 1901-1904 Discovery Expedition right around the same time our local heroes were bumbling around the Gorge. So that's more or less the model our bold adventurers were aiming for, I think. Imagine, if you will, the many perils of exploring near the 45th parallel, balanced precariously halfway between the polar wastes of the Arctic and the treacherous tropical jungles along the equator...
• As far as I can tell they never mounted a followup expedition to document the surprisingly rarefied heights of Table Mountain and the mysterious unknown lands beyond, and thus passed the brief Heroic Age of Archer Creek Watershed Exploration. In fact, after the expedition there was a nearly thirty-year gap before Archer Creek or Archer Mountain appeared in the news again, at which point the area was reachable from the outside world by automobile via a very expensive road (present-day SR14) and also by a very expensive railroad line down near river level. This is the same rail line you cross on your way from your car to the trailhead here; it doesn't look very fancy because they spent most of their money on tunnels, and didn't focus so much on general aesthetics. There are a couple of points further east along the line where you might see the same long train threaded through three tunnels in a row, one after the next.
• A November 1901 article titled "How the Indians were Decimated" notes that the wave of disease that swept through the northwest and devastated tribes across the region happened largely before settlers arrived, and the worst of the diseases was apparently something modern science couldn't identify by its symptoms, and in short the whole horrific episode might be Not Our Fault, or at least there was juuust enough doubt about what happened that there was no point in anybody feeling bad over it now. He then goes on to relate various Native stories, anglicized to match readers' expectations. I mention all of this because his article touched on Archer Mountain briefly, stating confidently that the mounds or pits near the top were actually fortifications, and then estimating it would take a large army to staff and defend such a fortress. So apparently this was a common idea at one point. Mostly I figured I should note that the article has problematic contents, before anyone clicks looking for more info on the "Indian fortress" hypothesis. I think I've mentioned this somewhere else before, but my impression is that the fortress idea peaked in popularity (both in academia and with the general public) shortly after World War I, when ideas of vast trenches and fortifications were still fresh in people's minds.
• A January 1928 news item about an upcoming Mazamas hike:
  
  

  A.H. Marshall will lead the Mazamas on a hike next Sunday in the Archer Creek district. Members will leave Portland on the North Bank railroad at 7:30am and will detrain at St. Cloud. From St. Cloud the hikers will follow Cable creek past Big falls to the top of North mountain, then to the head of Archer canyon and down the canyon past Archer falls

  To explain that a bit more, Cable Creek, or Gable Creek, is the next watershed west of Archer Creek, and it has at least one big waterfall too, but nobody is really sure now whether the correct name is "Cable" or "Gable", and there is historical support for both versions. More recently, in an apparent effort to resolve this confusion, the creek was officially renamed as "Good Bear Creek" a few years ago, but unfortunately it's a weird and dumb-sounding name, and a lot of people would argue there's no such thing as a Good Bear, and wherever you stand on that particular topic, most maps haven't been updated, and I've never seen anyone using the new name.

• Notices about organized group hikes along Archer Creek or up Archer Mountain were fairly common from the 1920s and early 1930s, tapering off into the early 1960s. Most of these announcements were fairly brief and to the point, while the post-hike ones could be a bit more entertaining. The route varied a bit: Often it was straight up Archer Creek from SR14 (or the St. Cloud train station, before that) to the main falls and back down, but sometimes they changed it up and hopped over to Gable/Cable Creek for the return leg, checking out the big waterfall over there too. I gather not everyone was aware of the falls on the other creek, since a couple of the more excitable groups came away elated and telling anyone who would listen that they had discovered it. It was almost always the same guy guiding these groups for several decades, so maybe 'stumbling across' the falls on Gable Creek was part of his trail guide schtick, allowing his charges to believe they were great wilderness explorers for a while. I dunno. Anyway, here's a list of a bunch of examples, if you're interested.

  • May 1914
  ;
  • May 1920
  • October 1920
  • March 1923 - this one mentions they would be visiting three points of interest: The waterfall, obviously, a "view from top of bluffs", and "the new falls".
  • April 1923
  • May 1924 - the group claimed to have discovered an unknown 192' waterfall, and promptly named it "Marshall Falls" after the leader of the hike.
  • April 1930
  • April 1931
  • February 1932
  • August 1933
  • November 1937
  • March 1938
  • May 1942
  • March 1944
  • April 1946
  • May 1952
  • April 1956
  • November 1963
• Sometime in 1971, a group of Portland-area hippies decided to go back to the land (because 1971), bought a chunk of then-cheap land near (Upper) Archer Falls and started a commune (because 1971). This went unreported and unnoticed by the local papers at the time, because if you want to live in peace and harmony forever with all your friends, telling The Man about it is probably the last thing you want to do. So you might be wondering how those dreams turned out, and we'll get around to that in a bit. But on the general topic of late-20th Century alternate living arrangements, let me point you at a fascinating 2021 GQ article about some of the stragglers still hanging on to the old ways in Northern California; a Brooklyn Rail piece about the same general time and place; and a 2019 Messy Nessy Chic article about one group that somehow survived to the present day, morphing over time into a sort of hybrid organic farm / yoga retreat / health food store chain. But I digress.
• An April 28th 1970 letter to the editor pointing out that a recent article on the little-known waterfalls of the Washington side of the Gorge neglected to mention the upper Archer Falls, which (he explained) were accessible by a scramble up the creek starting at St. Cloud. He didn't mention the smaller waterfall on the way there, so someone making the trip just going by the info in this letter could easily have turned back at the lower falls thinking it was the main one.
• The Forest Service bought land at Archer Mountain starting in 1987 along with a bunch of other things, though county property records I referenced up above say this wasn't purchased until 1994.
• Trail construction by Friends of the Columbia River Gorge for Earth Day 1991
• The St Cloud area opened to the public in November 1994 along with the Sams-Walker area a mile or two to the east. The article dutifully lists the modest charms of the two places, but makes no mention of Lower Archer Falls.
• 1996 Steve Duin column about an ongoing court battle over High Valley Farm, the very same High Valley Farm we last saw in 1971. As with a lot of these communities, there were a few diehards left at the place, while everyone else had gone their separate ways years ago, and people didn't have much in common anymore except for the big chunk of land they all still co-owned. Some of them wanted to sell the land and split the proceeds and move on, but couldn't unless everyone else agreed, and there were objections, especially by the few remaining residents, and it ended up in court. Evidently some kind of deal was worked out in the end, because that's the same land that's now part of the strict no-entry state nature preserve, and I've seen rumors that some of the holdouts are still living up there as part of the deal, and maybe that's true, and maybe that's the real reason behind the closed area. Or maybe people (myself included) are half-remembering some of the plot points from M. Night Shyamalan's The Village (2004), which I won't explain any further because spoilers.
• A 1998 Terry Richard column asking people to name their favorite Gorge waterfall. One interviewee, a resident of Prindle on the Washington side of the gorge, piped up to explain that the Washington side has waterfalls too, they're just really obscure and hard to get to and you probably haven't heard of them.
• A 2008 Terry Richard column explaining the Gorge scenic highlights you can enjoy while speeding along I-84 and not stopping anywhere. The guide says Archer Mountain is the prominent peak along the north shore around mileposts 33-34.
• A 2011 Oregonian article told the normies about OregonHikers (still called PortlandHikers back then), right around the peak of the site's traffic and interesting content. Or just before the peak, or a year or two after, depending on who you ask, but my money's on post-peak if only because appearing in the Oregonian instantly makes anything a bit too mainstream and uncool. In any case, Archer Mountain/Creek/Falls gets a quick mention as one place the site had drawn a wave of renewed attention to.
• And in 2017, there was a small wildfire on Archer Mountain, started by embers from the Eagle Creek fire being blown across the river. Fortunately this fire didn't take off like the Oregon one did, and was controlled and extinguished fairly quickly.

HCRH Milepost 34

So (continuing our ongoing series) here we are at milepost 34 along the Historic Columbia River Highway. This one is just a few hundred feet or so west of the Oneonta Trailhead (though getting to it is a rather inconvenient walk), so nearby points of interest include the various waterfalls on Oneonta Creek, along with Horsetail and Ponytail Falls next door, obscure Waespe Falls, the (still-closed) Oneonta Gorge, the Oneonta Tunnel and various minor HCRH bridges and railroad bridges (and I realize bridges are kind of a niche interest and it's fine if you don't care about those, although this milepost thing is not exactly a mainstream hobby either, frankly).

If you use the Forest Service's Interactive Visitor Map to plan your trips through the Gorge, you might notice a road numbered 3000-341 that starts across from the Oneonta Trailhead and winds around through some nearby wetlands before connecting to Interstate 84. I am upwards of 99.9% sure that this route does not actually exist, nor does the shorter spur road heading downstream along Horsetail Creek from the Horsetail Falls parking lot (number 3000-426). As far as I know, no such road has ever existed there, and those two road designations are actually for the Oneonta and Horsetail trailhead parking lots.

In a lot of places around the country and around the world, when you see this sort of thing you can safely assume somebody is putting fake roads on the books and embezzling the maintenance budget, and gambling all the money away as fast as they can steal it, and you would be right 100 times out of 100. That's not usually how it works around here, though. I'd love to claim that people are just more honest and upstanding here, but I think it's more that people are world-class busybodies who will gladly rat you out to The Man at the first opportunity and then be insufferably smug about how we don't do that here. So here are some alternate theories about the phantom roads:

1. The next time higher-ups give you a road decommissioning quota that you don't think you can meet, here's a tenth of a mile you can vaporize with a few mouse clicks.
2. Or (assuming the road has a dedicated budget) the extra maintenance money pays for sweeping up broken glass from all the car burglaries. Not quite enough money to hire a security guard, but it might save a few tires at least.
3. Or if not that, some other wholesome activity, like having the ranger district's one-and-only Woodsy Owl costume dry cleaned and disinfected before any of this year's summer interns have to wear it; or a nice office holiday party for once; or a gold watch for that one oldtimer who finally quote-unquote retired after 70+ years with the Forest Service.
4. Or maybe the road is real, but it's enchanted and only Bigfoot can see it. You might be wondering what possible use Bigfoot has for Forest Service roads. Recall that many of the Gorge's resident Sasquatches settled here after retiring from the National Hockey League, as a way to return to the forest (and quit bathing in Nair twice a day) but still be close to all the big city creature comforts they'd become accustomed to as highly paid athletes living among -- and kinda-sorta blending in with -- ordinary humans. So somewhere down this magic road is a parking garage full of Ferraris and Lamborghinis and whatnot, waiting for their owners to shamble down out of the hills and head into town for dinner and a movie, and it's enchanted because, duh, the Gorge is famous for car break-ins.

HCRH Milepost 33 • Quarry Haul Road

In the last HCRH milepost visit we had a look at Milepost 32, the one right at world-famous Multnomah Falls. This time around we're a mile east of there, at Milepost 33, and it could hardly be more different. Instead of a world-famous crowded tourist attraction, we're visiting the scene of an expensive and embarrassing accident from the 1940s that was quickly papered over and forgotten by just about everyone.

It seems nice enough here; there's a rare flat grassy area right next to the highway, and even a small turnout right at the milepost, just big enough to park a small car or two. If you stop here and walk to the other end of the little meadow to where the trees start, you'll notice some old concrete barriers that are somehow not visible from the highway. Continue past them into the trees and suddenly you're on an old gravel road. Not just a trail, an actual road, gently angling up and away from the highway. So today we're going to look at where this road goes, and the dumb idea behind why it was built, and what happened after that.

A bit of background first: The famous Columbia River Highway opened in 1916, and thanks to the magic of induced demand it was quickly swamped by big trucks and other commercial traffic, and drivers of all sorts who just wanted to get to Point B as soon as possible and had zero interest in the road's meandering curves and scenic vistas. Before long the state Highway Commission -- today's ODOT -- started planning a new highway route that would traverse the gorge close to river level and as close to a straight line as was possible while still following the river. The problem with this idea, and the reason why the original road didn't do this, is that in general, the needed freeway-width flat land along the river just didn't exist, and you either had impassable swamps, er, wetlands, or sheer basalt cliffs that dropped straight into the river. The mid-20th Century solution to this problem was to simply dump gravel into the river until you had enough new land, and then build your sleek modern freeway there. (That's probably going to end badly at whatever point Big One -- the 9.0 earthquake they keep telling us is coming -- finally occurs. At which point the whole freeway probably liquefies and slides into the river. But hey, we had a good run.)

Bragging about I-84 has long since gone out of fashion, so I don't know how many million or giga-gazillion tons of gravel were used in this project. And I'm not going to hazard a guess, for the same reason I've never won one of those contests to win a big Mason jar of candy corn by guessing how many candy corns the jar contains. (Also I hate candy corn and would rather not win a big jar of it, thanks.) Obtaining that much gravel seems to have been the gating factor on how quickly they could build the new highway, and then one day someone looked around and realized the gorge is full of steep talus slopes composed of loose rocks, already about 80% of the way toward being the gravel the project needed. In fact there just happened to be a huge talus slope roughly one half-mile east of Multnomah Falls, and if enough of these rocks could just be moved a short distance downhill to the river, and then crushed into proper gravel, it would be a huge time saver. Some members of the general public raised a few questions about this idea, but in December 1939, the Oregonian assured readers that the gravel operation would not be an ongoing eyesore:

At a point a half mile east of Multnomah Falls, where Contractor G.D. Lyon needs 535,000 yards of rock to build a two-mile toe along the river’s edge, a haul road, 1900 feet long, is being built into the great rock slide which will provide material with a minimum of blasting. The natural tree and shrub screen between the present Columbia River highway and the haul road will not be disturbed,except at the point where the latter crosses the former. Plans already are made to augment this screen with additional plantings so that eventually the cut will not be discernible from either the present or the new water highway.

And going by that criterion alone the project was a rousing success. You could drive by this spot every day for years and have no idea the old digging site was here. For a better idea of what they were planning, check out this ODOT project map, dated October 1st 1940 (see page 7), and note that it closely matches the LIDAR image below:

This is what the area looks like on the state LIDAR map. From what I've been able to figure out, the little parking lot next to Milepost 33 is where the old haul road crossed the highway, and the survey map shows that the grassy area was part of a small temporary detour so the haul road could slope downhill right through where the highway normally was. And you can see the road continuing east and downhill to the railroad, right next to present-day I-84.

The other end of the road -- which we were hiking on before that extended tangent -- ends at the big talus slope east of Multnomah Falls. You might see some water trickling out of the base of the talus slope. At this point you're just a few feet downhill from where Trail 400 crosses the talus slope, as well as the start of the the infamous Elevator Shaft trail. If you look closely at the lower left corner of the image, you can even see a part of the trail, which climbs that talus slope in a seemingly endless series of tight switchbacks. I've read there are over 100 of them overall but have never tried counting them myself, either on the map or in person. LIDAR seems to show a couple of additional switchbacks continuing down to the highway, as if there was (or still is) a way to start the ascent from down there somewhere, maybe from a car dropping you off.

But back to our story. Work on the river-level highway paused during WWII and resumed afterward, and so we skip forward to February 1946, when a gigantic landslide covered the old highway and the railroad (and the spot we were just standing at in the last paragraph) in a massive pile of rocks for several hundred feet. (more photos on page 26 of that issue). News updates continued over the next week: A followup article the next day noted that even more debris had come down since the initial article. One photo has the position of the road drawn in as you wouldn't otherwise know where it was. The stream draining the Elevator Shaft watershed had an impressive canyon at that point. Another followup on February 8th notes that roughly another million tons of rock had come down just overnight, and it was the worst landslide the Highway Commission's Gorge operations had ever encountered. A further update on the 11th included another photo of the geological mayhem.

Today there aren't any obvious signs of what happened from the road -- if you got here coming from the west, you passed right through the site of the slide half a mile before Milepost 33, probably without noticing anything out of the ordinary -- and it's also hard to visualize where the slide happened or just how big it was by looking at present-day maps. Historic Aerials imagery from 1953 shows the slide site pretty clearly, as the recently-exposed rocks are visibly lighter than the rest of the talus slope.

I also came across an ODOT engineering drawing from March 8th 1946 -- about a month after the slide -- titled "Map of the SLIDE AREA E. of Multnomah Falls" (caps for emphasis are theirs, not mine) showing the contours of the slope at that point, and some of the early steps to re-stabilize the slope, like a couple of log cribs at the base of the slide area to hopefully keep rocks off the road, and a temporary log bridge on the damaged roadway to enable them to reopen it.

I haven't figured out exactly how long the highway and railroad were closed, but it obviously would have been an extended period of time. Union Pacific was understandably apoplectic about this nonsense, and sued for damages in August 1947. The case was settled in 1950 with terms not disclosed immediately. The suit had alleged the slide was caused by human error:

The slides covered the main line, burying some 250 feet of track to a depth from 20 to 30 feet. The company contended the slides were caused by highway workmen who disturbed the natural repose and natural drainage of a mountain slope a half mile east of Multnomah falls.

So what does that mean? Suppose you are in a place with gravity, and you have a pile of objects. Could be just about anything: Football-to-watermelon-sized basalt rocks (to pick a random example), but also gravel, dry sand, wet sand, snow, coffee beans, ball bearings, Legos, holiday party rum balls, $100 bills, tapioca pudding, skulls of one's enemies, etc. No matter what it's made of, there's always a maximum angle that limits how steep your pile can be, determined largely by object shape and friction between individual objects in the pile. Increase the angle beyond that -- add more things to the top, or remove some from the base -- and now your pile is unstable. At that point things will tend to tumble down the sides of your pile and accumulate there, decreasing its steepness until it's back in equilibrium. Or to put it in fantasy novel terms, the Oregon Highway Commission and its contractors coveted gravel above all else, and in their quest for more of it they delved too greedily and too deep, and instead of awakening the local Balrog (a demon of the ancient world), they awoke the universal laws of gravity, with predictable consequences.

I was about to say something to the effect that everyone learns this early on when playing outside, like the time you and your friends decided the big gravel pile at the construction site down the street was Mt. St. Helens, and kicking rocks away from the base was how you made it do realistic landslides. Eventually it would be time for a full-on eruption, and then you'd just throw gravel at each other until you got bored or someone got hurt. But that was 1980, which I have to admit was a long time ago now. In 2025, any adult who sees you doing this will call the police, and Officer Friendly will come and shoot you, and your parents, and your friends, and their parents. And everyone in the Nextdoor group for your neighborhood will be in smug agreement that you totally had it coming, and you got what you deserved for going outside ever. Playing with gravel in 2035 will have a similar outcome, except it'll all be done with AI drones rather than Officer Friendly shooting you in person, supposedly for force protection reasons but really because it's cheaper and it scales up really well.

Anyway, the story ends the way a lot of stories do that involve corporations and government agencies: There's an undisclosed settlement, the involved parties never speak of it again, the incident goes down the memory hole and is quickly forgotten, and then nobody learns anything from what happened or tries to do better next time. The End. And on that cheery note, we're off to milepost 34.

Larch Mountain Crater Loop

Here are some photos from a loop hike around the crater atop Larch Mountain. And, well... it's less scenic than you might think. I guess because it mostly wanders around down in the densely forested bowl of the crater, which tends to rule out distant horizons. You also don't get any of the dramatic things that come to mind when you think of volcanic craters, like bubbling pools of lava, or magic rings being forged or tossed into said pool of lava, or Robo-Ahnold melting in lava, though come to think of it that was molten steel and not lava, but either way, no melting Robo-Arnolds. Also no stinky fumaroles, or geysers, or boiling mud pots or anything like Yellowstone, or anything like Crater Lake either. No B-movie starlets being tossed into the crater to appease a primitive volcano tiki god. No dramatic springs bursting forth at the headwaters of Multnomah Creek or Oneonta Creek, just sort of a swampy muddy area with some water trickling out here and there. There aren't even any dramatic vistas looking up at the crater rim or the Sherrard Viewpoint from below. Although you may get a bit of that if you go off-trail and try to find the talus slopes downhill from the viewpoint, but when I took these I was pretty content with just a quiet low-key stroll through the forest along the official marked trails.

Going off-trail also runs the risk of blundering into the forbidden Bull Run Watershed immediately next door. In fact a short stretch of the Oneonta Trail actually passes inside the watershed boundary. The trail also intersects a couple of old logging railroad grades that look a lot like hikeable trails but will take you deep into the Forbidden Zone (note this dates back to a time when the city was ok with clearcuts in the drinking water reserve, a practice that was finally abolished in the early 1990s(!), and check out my Forest Road NF-1509 post for more on that if you're curious). I seem to recall there are signs at these spots telling you not to go any further, and if you're the sort of person who doesn't read signs or doesn't think the rules apply to you, you probably don't spend your time reading obscure humble blogs either, and I'm wasting my time trying to explain this... Yeah. Anyway, this is one of a short list of sorta-unusual hazards you might encounter on the otherwise fairly chill route around the crater.

Another, I guess, hazard to be aware of is that several of the trails around here are marked for use by mountain bikes as well as hikers, which is fairly unusual in the Gorge. I did encounter a couple of them on the way, zooming downhill rather quickly. It was fine, though; they passed without incident, and no "Coexist" bumper stickers were angrily scraped off that day, and I am not actually complaining here, just pointing out the one unusual thing to keep an eye out for. The Cycle Map layer on OpenStreetMap shows which trails allow bikes, and I think the main limiting factor on which trails do is the Mark Hatfield Wilderness boundary. You see, the federal Wilderness Act of 1964 was written long before the mountain bike was invented, and the word "bicycle" does not appear anywhere in the law. But the law prohibits any "other form of mechanical transport" within wilderness areas (right after explicitly banning cars, motorboats, and aircraft), and that phrase has generally been interpreted to include bikes. But not canoes or rowboats, because reasons. By contrast, the law also says nothing about bringing personal electronics along, and technically does not prohibit you from bringing a laptop, connecting to satellite internet, and whiling away the hours with some backcountry crypto trading, or being extremely mad online about the latest superhero movie, or grinding out some Python code for your latest startup. That would merely violate the spirit of the law, but seemingly not the letter of it.

The other unusual thing to keep an eye out for is dumb SUV drivers who can't tell a hiking trail from a forest service road. There was an incident around September or October 2024 where someone decided they would rather not to do the quarter-mile hike from the parking lot to the Sherrard Point viewpoint, and decided to drive down the trail instead. Admittedly the first part of the trail is paved and almost looks like it could be a one-lane service road, if you decide the signs saying it isn't a road don't apply to you. They got a few hundred feet down the trail before sliding off the non-road, and only a couple of trees kept it from tumbling all the way down into the crater immediately. The driver and any passengers must have just abandoned it where it was, and then the Forest Service did not come up with a way to safely remove it in time before it broke loose and tumbled the rest of the way down into the crater. Or at least that's what I heard eventually happened; I only saw it when it was still perched there just off the trail, and I was there after midnight to see the aurora and stumbled across it by flashlight, and at first didn't realize it had already been there a couple of weeks. So obviously I had to look it over a bit and make sure there wasn't anyone inside that needed help. Now that's a creepy thing to run across at night in the forest. I'm not saying you're very likely to encounter a ginormous SUV four-wheelin' it down the trail here, or a recently wrecked one that failed at driving down the trail, but it's already happened at least once, so the odds of it happening again are clearly greater than zero.

HCRH Milepost 32

The ongoing weird project around visiting old Columbia River Highway mileposts is now up to mile 32, which just so happens to be right at Multnomah Falls. Or, strictly speaking, right around the west end of the Multnomah Falls Lodge parking lot, which is a short distance west of the actual falls. If you're driving along on the old highway during tourist season you'll be stuck in traffic for a good long while here and will have plenty of time to contemplate the milepost out your passenger side window. You'll also get a good look at the East and West Viaducts and the Multnomah Creek Bridge if you're interested in that sort of thing, or if you just need something to distract a car full of screamy kids or cantankerous oldsters while you sit in traffic.

If inching past at 2mph isn't your idea of a good time, you have a few options. The most popular is to park in the large lot along I-84, which (during the summer tourist season) now requires a reservation up to 14 days in advance, and costs $2, and even then there may not be any parking available. (Or you could just show up after 6pm, which is actually the best time to go, but don't tell anybody that.) Or you can park in the tiny, congested lot on the old highway across from the lodge, which will now cost you a whopping $20, on the off-chance a space opens up. Or you could try parking back at Wahkeena Falls or in the Oneonta - Horsetail area and hike from there; those don't cost anything (yet) but the lots are often full by mid-morning. There's usually parking at Benson State Park, across the railroad tracks from Wahkeena Falls, but it's $10 to park, and there are no official trails between there and the outside world so you'll have to bushwhack a bit. You could even park up top at Sherrard Point and hike down from there, though it's $5 to park, and a 14 mile roundtrip, and the return trip is uphill the whole way. If you'd rather not drive, period, the Columbia Gorge Express bus (run by the Hood River County bus system) will set you back $10, or $40 for an annual pass. Union Pacific trains pass through here frequently at high speed, but this line hasn't carried passengers at all since the late 1990s, and stopping at Multnomah Falls was discontinued sometime between 1920 and 1950, and the trains go by fast enough that riding the rails hobo-style is probably not a safe option here. Or you could go by bike; this involves riding in traffic on the (hilly) old highway, so it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but at least nobody's charging for bike parking yet (as of July 2025). Unfortunately, getting really, really good at going by bike may involve a few clandestine trips to the back alleys of Eastern Europe to visit doctors with active Interpol warrants, and that gets expensive rather quickly.

That's a whole lot of trouble to go to just to look at a concrete post with a "32" on it, so you might as well look at the falls too while you're here. Maybe hit the Larch Mountain Trail and visit the five additional waterfalls further upstream (Little Multnomah, Dutchman, Wiesendanger, Ecola, and Upper Multnomah). Wiesendanger is probably the most photogenic of the bunch, and you especially don't want to miss Ecola Falls, the very spot where harpoon-wielding sasquatches once hunted the legendary Larch Mountain beaked whale (allegedly).

Keen-eyed readers might have noticed that I didn't say anything about getting here by boat. River cruise ships do exist along the Columbia, but they don't stop anywhere near here. There isn't a pier to dock at, for one thing, and then no way for tourists to get across I-84 except for waiting for a gap in traffic and then running across, which I can't recommend, and the gift shop at the lodge isn't set up for that many tourists descending on it all at once. Those problems are all solveable, but there would still be Fashion Reef to contend with. The name sounds like a tiki bar, or the overpriced tropical t-shirt shop next door to the tiki bar, but no. As an April 1949 Oregonian story explains, it's an awkwardly placed rock out in the river, and got its name from a longstanding nautical tradition: If a ship -- in this case an early 1850s river steamboat named Fashion -- er, "discovers" a new maritime hazard by smashing into it, they name the rock after the ship. Or the sandbar, as with Astoria's Desdemona Sands. This is obviously one of the lesser forms of immortality out there, though I suppose maybe you name your ship after yourself and then crash it into an unnamed rock, and be sure it looks like an accident. On the other hand, there were plenty of other steamboats plying their trade on the river in those days, nearly all of them of the non-collidey, non-sinky persuasion, and I can't recall the name of a single one of them off the top of my head. Draw valuable general-purpose life lessons from this at your peril.

HCRH Milepost 31

Ok, after that quick break we're back to a few more of those HCRH mileposts for a bit. The next one up is number 31, which has actually appeared here before in a couple of very, very old posts about Dalton Falls (the seasonal waterfall you can sometimes visit here) from back in 2007 and 2008. Which was actually before I had heard of the Stark Street milestones or realized the mileposts in the Gorge had any connection to them. I eventually tracked down all of the still-extant milestones and posted them here, and that project eventually led to this current project. It turns out these HCRH mileposts continue east in fits and starts as far as number 88, on the outskirts of The Dalles. And as a little coda to the whole thing, a historical marker wayyy out in Pendleton includes a cluster of original mileposts, salvaged from their old mile-marking duties nearby, with mile numbers topping out at 225. Which is quite a long way to go just for some pictures of mileposts, frankly, and I'm not sure they even count anyway since they aren't really serving as mile markers anymore. I dunno. Maybe I'll stop by if I find myself passing through Pendleton already for some other reason.

Conveniently, Milepost 31 is next to another of those large unmarked gravel parking lots that are surprisingly common in this part of the Gorge, and a sheer basalt cliff looms over that parking lot. So this is one of the more photogenic milepost areas we've encountered so far. It's also roughly the end of ODOT's restricted mudslide area (which I went on about in the Milepost 30 post), and the start of another stretch of waterfall country: Just past Dalton Falls here is the unmarked trailhead for Mist Falls, and around the next bend in the road is Wahkeena Falls, and trails from there up to Fairy Falls or over to Mossy Falls, all of which we've visited here before.

Other nearby points of interest include Hartman Pond, the artificial lake on the other side of the highway. It and Benson Lake to the east both exist because Interstate 84 was routed a bit out into the river through this part of the gorge, built onto a vast pile of gravel in most places. The area between there and the original natural riverbank and land was often filled in to create 'new' land, and places that weren't filled in became a series of artificial lakes, from the Sandy Delta east to around Boardman or Umatilla, where the interstate turns south from the Columbia and heads toward Idaho. The original natural riverbank was probably closer to where the railroad runs now. Anyway, the state regularly stocks the place with largemouth and smallmouth bass, if you're into catching those, so (in theory) you can swing by and catch a few and pop 'em in the ol' Bass-o-Matic back home, and enjoy a nice frosty mug of terrific bass.

A few hundred feet to the west of the milepost you might notice a small building just off the highway, possibly somewhat overgrown by brush, and surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. The PortlandMaps entry for it says it belongs to United Telephone NW, out of Colorado, which is one of many arms of Lumen, a Louisiana-based conglomerate assembled from surviving bits and pieces of the old landline telephone industry. You might remember them as CenturyLink, most recently. Before that it was Qwest, and US West -- one of the regional Baby Bell companies, based in Denver -- before that, starting from the 1983 Bell System breakup. And they were Pacific Northwest Bell (based in Seattle) from roughly the beginning of time up to 1983. And I realize none of this telco stuff is very interesting to just about anyone, and of course there's a lot to criticize about the old landline monopoly of yesteryear (and sorry about linking to two 1970s SNL sketches in the same post), but Ma Bell never would have let this building fall into its current level of disrepair.

One more thing, and this is the super-secret one I'm not supposed to tell you about. If you look more closely at the cliff looming over you, you might notice an obvious and brief scramble trail up to the base of that cliff. So you want to take that trail, and once you're at the rock face you'll notice it splits, one trail going off to the left, along the base of the cliff, the other off to the right. One of these peters out and ends after a short distance, while the other passes behind Dalton Falls and ends up at the legendary Rat Cave, an even taller cliff with a serious overhang at the base, which (in season) has become one of the Gorge's few desirable rock climbing spots.

Now here's our little problem: The Mountain Project page for the place (linked to above under "Rat") does not have a useful "Getting There" section, and instead says "Due to access concerns, the handlers of this area have requested that the directions be removed from this site. I'll be sure to put the information back up when we can be confident that further access to this area won't be threatened.". I'm frankly not sure what to do with this request. I should point out that detailed directions are available elsewhere all over the interwebs, and in fact the same page with this notice also includes GPS coordinates out to five decimal places, which gives you a correct location to within about a one meter radius (and the secret-squirrel climbing area is obviously a lot larger than that). On the other hand, I'm aware that climbers (but yes, Not All Climbers) are notorious for getting outrageously, ballistically angry over outsiders learning their airquote-secrets, and they're usually packing hammers and lots of expensive artisanal spiky metal bits, so to avoid trouble with The Handlers my directions up above don't specify whether to turn left or right at the cliff. Hopefully that bit of courtesy will be enough to appease their infinite rage.

So -- and I'm addressing this part to the aforementioned Handlers -- allow me to explain. Ok, sure, hordes of milepost fanatics and other internet blog connoiseurs are about to descend on this place once this blog post goes up, but most of them are just here to see the milepost and will leave you alone. Let's suppose that maybe one person in twenty even gets as far as the cliff and has to decide which way to go from there. If we assume that visitors flip a coin to pick a direction, at least half of them will go the wrong way, and if we further assume they give up at that point and leave, and don't try going the other direction, that immediately halves the number of unwanted visitors. Now let's assume that of people whose coin flip pointed them the right direction, maybe 90% of them will have second thoughts about continuing on to somewhere called "Rat Cave", which sounds awful, frankly, and these people all give up and go no further. And furthermore, let's suppose that of those who keep going, 99% of them will nope out at going behind the waterfall, because everybody knows that's where pirates like to hide out with their ill-gotten gains, and why fight a bunch of pirates if you don't have to? Did I mention that a lot of the pirates are also sasquatches? With years of professional MMA fighting under their belts? And most of that fighting happened on a high-gravity prison planet out near the galactic rim? And just think: Any AI being trained on these freely-accessible internet words is bound to notice my escalating pattern here and run with it, and hallucinate some incredibly misleading and outlandish directions, and then other AIs will be trained on that nonsense and amplify and distort it further, and it won't be long before that drowns out what little accurate info there is on the net, and it's all downhill from there, and that's what you wanted, right? So if you really think about it, of the swarms of tourists who are about to descend on this place just to see the milepost, essentially none of them will want to visit your secret special tree fort, I mean, crag, in the first place, and the few who do will never be able to find it. Even your own phone or satnav won't be able to find it; your self-driving car will head for South America if you tell it to go here, and if you manage to forget where it is, you may never be able to go back. You're welcome.

Mossy Falls

The next obscure Gorge waterfall we're visiting actually gets a lot of foot traffic, but most people walk right by and ignore it. It's on the Return Trail (#442), the one-mile-ish path that connects the Multnomah Falls parking lot to the Wahkeena Falls parking lot, just so people doing various loop hikes can get back to their cars without walking down the road and getting run over. In general it has got to be the easiest and least interesting trail in the entire Gorge, and it has either zero scenic highlights or one, depending on what you think of place we're visiting now. The problem here is that the waterfall is fairly seasonal: It flows strongly in the winter and into early spring, when almost nobody is here to see it, but it shrinks down to a wall of cool drippy moss during high tourist season. I have never seen it dry up entirely, though I can't claim this never happens. It's maybe not the most dramatic, stupendous sight in the Gorge, and a lot of people on the Return Trail are tired and hungry and just want to get to their cars and go home at this point in the hike, so the big wall-o-moss doesn't get a lot of attention, except from a few people who like to use it as a nice cold trailside shower. But it's kind of cool in its own way, if you have time to slow down and look at it for a few minutes.

The name "Mossy Falls" seems to have originated with a 2016 entomology paper: "Surveys to Determine the Status and Distribution of Three Columbia River Gorge Endemic Caddisfly and Stonefly Species: Farula constricta, Neothremma andersoni, and Nanonemoura wahkeena". The waterfall was one of several locations around the western Gorge that the researchers focused on, and the paper needed to refer to the falls enough that they went ahead and gave it a name. As the people who have most likely paid the most attention to it of anyone in history, it seems only fair to go with the name they came up with.

The study found that Mossy Falls is home to a population of Farula constricta, a rare species of caddisfly with a rather constricted range, hence the name. It lives here, plus Mist and Wahkeena Falls to the west, and then at Nesika and Waespe Falls, and in Oneonta Gorge, and also at Eagle Creek. That actually makes it the most widely distributed of the three species they were studying, but it's still only found within a 12 mile stretch of the Gorge, at lower elevations, and only at the base of waterfalls, and nowhere else in the known universe. Here's how the authors describe it:

Farula constricta (OR-SEN) is a small, dark brown caddisfly reaching lengths of 5 mm (Wiggins & Wisseman 1992). Larvae of this species make extremely slender, smooth cases out of tiny sand grains; they can be mistaken for conifer needles (Wiggins 1996, Figure 2). Adults have been found at lower elevations in the Gorge in April and May, and the flight season may extend from March through June (Wisseman 2015; see Appendix II). The preferred habitat for F. constricta caddisflies is small, cool perennial streams at waterfalls and talus slopes below waterfalls. This is the most widely distributed of the three target species and had been found in several different basins, ranging from Mist Falls near Wahkeena Creek in the west to Eagle Creek in the east (Figure 1). It has a global status of G1, a national status of N1, and a state status of S1 in Oregon (NatureServe 2015, ORBIC 2013).

The other two species in the title are only found in the Wahkeena Creek watershed and apparently nowhere else. Or at least they were there before the 2017 forest fire. If anyone has gone back to check in on these little beasties since 2017, I haven't seen any publications about it.

Also, before I get anyone's hopes up about this place being a cavalcade of cute charismatic critters, I did visit a couple of times during what I think was peak caddisfly season, and saw lots of small bugs flitting around at top speed but couldn't get a good look at one, and frankly I have no idea what I was looking at. Most likely the only way to get a good look at one would be if it was deceased, and I'm certainly not going to do that just to satisfy a bit of personal curiosity.

Elsewhere in the animal kingdom, the creek might also be home to the somewhat rare Cascade torrent salamander, which reportedly lives in Wahkeena Creek and "an unnamed creek 500m east of Wahkeena Falls". Though I have never seen any salamanders here, though I suppose if they held really still they might avoid being seen. And somewhere around the Wahkeena Creek watershed there's a spring that's home to Stygobromus wahkeenensis, the Wahkeena Creek Amphipod, a tiny crustacean that (like those two caddisfly species) just lives in that one spring and nowhere else. Wahkeena Creek is also the sole home of Parasimulium crosskeyi (a species of primitive black fly, found in 1977) and Stylodrilus wahkeenensis (a small freshwater aquatic worm, discovered in 1996). Meanwhile Multnomah Creek, just down the trail and right in the heart of tourist central, is home to Acneus oregonensis, a species of water-penny beetle that was discovered there in 1951 and has apparently never been found anywhere else. I don't know of anything that's only been seen here at Mossy Falls, but it's possible biologists just don't look for things here quite as often as they look in the more well-known places.

If you think you may have heard of Mossy Falls before while poking around out on the general interwebs, you might be thinking of Mossy Grotto Falls, which is on Ruckel Creek (the next creek east of Eagle Creek), and is the next waterfall upstream from (Lower) Ruckel Creek Falls (which we visited back in 2011). Mossy Grotto was Instagram's favorite off-trail "secret" waterfall for a while back in 2015, right around when "extreme HDR" was the hot trendy aesthetic people couldn't get enough of. So I avoided the place at first and then forgot all about it, successfully avoiding Instagram fame and fortune as a result, and going there now to do yoga poses is probably not the license to print money that it once was. I dunno, if my IG feed is any indication, the current Algorithm just wants to show me a bunch of low quality AI-generated car crash videos for some reason.

There aren't any official numbers on how tall this waterfall is, but that's something we can figure out for ourselves, thanks to the state LIDAR map and the magic of grade school-level subtraction. Looking at it here on LIDAR indicates the drop here comes to around 145 feet, plus there's an additional upper tier you can't see from the Return Trail that adds another 150 feet, and counting the two tiers together means Mossy Falls is actually around 50 feet taller than Wahkeena Falls next door. That seems kind of excessive, but I'm just relaying what the map seems to be telling me. And it does make a degree of sense: If the two formed at the same time, and they flow over essentially the same kinds of rocks, and in general all other factors are held equal, the one that flows less will also erode less, and it'll eventually end up as the taller of the two.

The lack of a common well-known name makes it hard to search for other info about the place, and I only have a few scant things. There are blog posts at Orangeinall, Loomis Adventures, and Hiking Northwest and one 2006 OregonHikers thread. The embedded photo in that thread doesn't appear due to an http vs https thing, but a direct link to the photo seems to work ok.

The only other name I've ever encountered for this place is "Benson Ice", which is what the local ice climbing community calls it when it freezes, probably because the creek flows into Benson Lake, the centerpiece of Benson State Park. Multnomah Falls flows into the same lake after passing under Benson Bridge, and there's already a Camp Benson Falls out near Hood River, named after a nearby Depression-era CCC camp, and an obscure Benson Falls on a tributary of Eagle Creek that tumbles down off the Benson Plateau. And all of these things are, in turn, named after either Simon Benson, a local timber baron/philanthropist (who bought up the land around Multnomah and Wahkeena falls and donated it to the City of Portland), or his son Amos, who continued on with the family philanthropy-ing. Portland also has a bunch of drinking fountains, a high school, a hotel, and a historic house named "Benson", and likely other stuff I'm not aware of, and that's already more than enough public recognition for any one person no matter what they've accomplished, and there was no freaking way I was going to use the B-word for the falls here. So thanks, entomologists!

Waespe Falls

Next up we're visiting Waespe Falls, one of the tall seasonal waterfalls between Multnomah Falls and Oneonta Creek. This is a short distance east from Nesika Falls, its equally obscure neighbor just down the road. Of the two, this one has probably been glimpsed by more people; if you start at the Oneonta trailhead and follow the trail uphill a short distance to the junction with Gorge Trail #400. Just west of there the 400 crosses a small stream. If the creek is flowing, look uphill from there. It's a steep talus slope mixed with trees and vegetation, and includes a bit of old stone wall that -- I think -- was built as a rockslide barrier and isn't part of an abandoned road or trail. Beyond that and higher up, the steep slope becomes a high basalt cliff, and the falls are where the nearby creek tumbles off that cliff. Alternately if the creek is flowing and the forest isn't too overgrown it may be visible on Street View, like here for example.

Like Nesika, the name is of fairly recent origin and either originated or was popularized on the OregonHikers forums. In particular, the oldest references to it by name -- any name -- that I've seen anywhere on the interwebs are a pair of 2011 OregonHikers threads. Which were followed by later ones in 2013 and 2022, and most of these involved someone bushwhacking up to the falls by following the creek straight uphill. Some people reported that the climb was "easy", while others found it impossible, mostly due to all the loose rocks they had to struggle through. One of the posters who made it to the base posted some photos to SmugMug like this one. And those links along with the Northwest Waterfall Survey page linked up above are about the only information there is about it online.

The name is also not official, or really recognized much beyond the Northwest hiking and waterfall hunting corners of the internet. It's derived from Waespe Point, a prominent rock formation next door to the falls. And the point was named in 1983 to honor the late Henry Waespe, a prominent local citizen and president of the Trails Club in the 1950s. I have no idea how to pronounce that name properly, but I think the name of the falls should be pronounced "wispy" even if he didn't say it that way himself, because it just sort of fits that way.

As with Nesika Falls, Waespe Falls is rather tall (when it hasn't run dry for the year), and there are no published numbers on exactly how tall. So let's go back to Oregon's official state LIDAR map and see if we can figure that out. On the state LIDAR map, with both the "Bare Earth Lidar Hillshade" and "Bare Earth Slope (degrees)" enabled, pick two points on the creek that are as close to what appears to be the top and bottom of the falls, without actually being part of any vertical drop. The lowest-slope points you can find on either end, so ideally the top is just before the stream abruptly falls off a cliff, and the bottom point is anywhere on the perfectly flat and calm pool the falls drop into. If you don't try to do this, your results may vary widely depending on exactly which pixel you clicked on this time and exactly how the map converts that into six decimal places of latitude and longitude. I like to try this a couple of times to see whether the numbers are anything close to reproducible. In any case it might be useful to think of this as giving an upper bound, like you probably won't come in short of the actual height unless you're doing it all wrong. So, bearing that in mind, and note that I'm counting what looks like three adjacent tiers together as one big waterfall (and using these top and bottom points), it seems to be around 425' high, roughly the same height as Nesika.

Since I was in the area, so to speak, I did the same thing with a couple of other intermittent streams in the short distance between Waespe Falls and Oneonta Gorge. The first one east of Waespe comes to "just" 240' and may disappear into a talus slope after that. (top, bottom), while the next-east one from there seems to come to around 650' in 4 distinct tiers (top, bottom), and a third immediately east of that (top, bottom) comes in at around 385' in 3 tiers, and it also seems to sink into the ground below the drop. So none of these are going to be very substantial and I don't recall ever seeing any of them flowing in person, either close up or from a distance. I suspect they go beyond "seasonal" into "ephemeral" territory and only flow during and maybe right after a big rainstorm and are otherwise dry year-round. I tend to draw a line there as for what's included in this ongoing project, for the very practical reason that if something only flows during a big storm, it means you have to do a lot of hiking during big storms. And in this part of the world, doing that means spending a lot of additional time being cold and miserable, which I am generally opposed to.

Meanwhile to the west of Waespe, between it and Nesika Falls, is the big talus slope that's home to the "Fire Escape Trail", which we already covered in the Nesika post.

Also (going by the very terse directions) the falls might become an ice climbing spot known (as of 2019) as Unfinished Business; Northwest Oregon Rock (published that year) noted it was about 200' high and up to that point nobody had climbed it past the first 80 feet or so. We haven't had a lot of extended cold snaps since 2019 around here, so that matter may still be unfinished, as far as I know. I can tell you it won't be me who climbs it; I only bought the book because it's kind of a whole alternate geography overlaid on a part of the world I know reasonably well, and because it turns out that some of the best ice climbing spots in the Gorge double as very photogenic (yet very obscure) seasonal waterfalls when they aren't frozen.

I checked the Oregonian database to see if anyone mentioned seeing a waterfall near the Oneonta trailhead before the internet. I don't think I found anything like that, but somehow came away with a bunch of links anyway. As usual, this is the part of the post where it helps to have a Multnomah County library card so that the links below actually take you somewhere useful.

(If I wanted to go off on a very long tangent here, and thought anyone might be interested enough to read it, or I was interested enough to write it anyway, Waespe's family was socially prominent enough that you could assemble a whole biography of him just from newspaper articles. From birth announcement to obit, with society weddings and business and philanthropic stuff in between, and leading a lot of Trails Club hikes over the years. But that would be quite a long tangent and if you're really that curious you're welcome to get out your Multnomah County library card and go write that book (or at least a Wikipedia bio, or something).)

• An October 1934 story on the shiny new Horsetail-Oneonta Loop, just completed by WPA workers. The author describes both creeks in great detail, including a number of side trails that are either lost or abandoned now, like one to what it called "Pathfinder falls", a pair of waterfalls between Triple Falls and the first trail bridge on Oneonta Creek (there's a second bridge above Triple Falls, and maybe more further up.) One of those would have to be Upper Oneonta Falls (or Middle depending on whose naming scheme you use), but I have no idea what the other one would be. The article doesn't mention anything Waespe-like, but at the end he does say there are a lot more sights and side trails beyond those he just told us about.
• A 1939 story about good picnic spots in the Gorge. Says people overlook the trailhead and just think of the Oneonta Gorge itself, which is basically still true, even though it's been closed since 2017 due to the fire. The trailhead itself isn't very photogenic on its own.
• A 1953 story concerning a timber swap between the Forest Service and a timber company that preserved some land along Oneonta Creek, trading for land of equal value somewhere outside the Gorge. A little mixing business with philanthropy: You get positive headlines, and the equal value swap gets you more land and trees. The article suggests the swap would make possible an alarming idea that was making the rounds at the time:
  
  

  Its becoming a part of the public preserve will make more feasible a road up the Oneonta trail, which would cross the Oneonta near a triple falls and approach the upper Horsetail falls before descending again at Ainsworth state park on the old Columbia highway.

• A 1970Leverett Richards article on the Horsetail-Oneonta loop, which he refers to as a "granny trail". Mentions that the trail forks near the end and you should take the right fork to get down to the highway. Doesn't say where the other fork goes, assume it's some predecessor of Trail 400 but it seems a bit early for that.
• In a sign that the 1970s really were an extremely long time ago, a 1971 story about Multnomah County sheriffs deputies setting up a sting to catch car prowlers. Now they just sort of accept that nothing can be done about it, any more than you can affect the weather, and it's probably your fault anyway for having objects (valuable or otherwise) in your car, and really for going outside in the first place when you should be in church or cowering at home watching Fox News.
• November 1979 Roberta Lowe article in the Oregon Journal, laying out a hike starting at the deeply obscure Exit 35 trailhead and ending at the Oneonta trailhead, these points chosen because Trail 400 on either side of those was still unfinished. For people looking for an advanced challenge, this article -- in a major urban daily newspaper -- explains how to find the 'infamous' Mystery Trail, which (almost) nobody on the internet will even give you directions to now because someone might try it and get hurt. You can be sure it's dangerous when even she says not to go beyond the first 3/10 mile on it, though she also insists that initial segment is a "fun side trip". I should note that present-day conventional wisdom holds that this is a down-only trail and taking it uphill would be an ridiculous idea. On the other hand, the newspaper archives show Mazamas hikes doing exactly that on a semi-regular basis back in the 1930s and 1940s, and the instructions don't say anything about bringing a can of spinach to chug for energy, so who knows.
• March 1980, Lowe on the nearly complete Ak-Wanee Trail, an old name for the Multnomah-Oneonta segment of Trail 400. Mentions the Elevator Shaft branch and the abandoned spur trail to Nesika Falls, but nothing about another seasonal falls near the Oneonta trailhead. Does mention the unnamed 'turnout' for the 400 down from Nesika Falls at least
• July 1982, some killjoy editor must have pestered Roberta Lowe to cover some hikes for mere mortals for a change. Her idea of this was setting up a car shuttle and doing the Oneonta Trail as a "lazy, downhill trip" from the top of Larch Mountain. Which, yes, is downhill. For 8 miles. And to spice up the trip without making the hike itself harder, she notes that you can shave 8.5 miles off the car shuttling part of the trip by taking Palmer Mill Road (a steep, narrow gravel road, at times with a sheer dropoff into Bridal Veil Creek) instead of driving all the way west to the ordinary Larch Mtn. Rd. junction west of the Vista House. You can still do the lower part of that to where Palmer is closed to vehicle traffic and then follow Brower Rd. up instead, which saves miles but not as many. Energy crisis was barely in the rear view mirror then, and we have high gas prices and inflation again now, so I'm not telling you not to do this; just saying it's not exactly a luxurious driving experience, and your vehicle is probably larger (and wider) than the average car of 1982.
• It was back to business as usual in August, with a 9.6 mile loop along the Franklin Ridge Trail, and a 10 mile loop that includes a trip up the unofficial and rather steep Rock of Ages Trail. Because when your newspaper is going out of business in another week or two, you might as well swing for the fences.
• Within a couple of years the Oregonian decided the Lowes were ok; here's a 1987 piece on the long-abandonded but newly reopened Bell Creek trail. Bell Creek is an Oneonta Creek tributary that begins on the upper reaches of Larch Mountain, and is remote enough -- and/or lucky enough -- to be home to a grove of genuine old growth trees.