Winter at Dalton Falls

A few photos of icy Dalton Falls, out in the Columbia Gorge, taken earlier this morning. If you've never heard of Dalton Falls (and most people haven't), you might want to check out an earlier post of mine here, which is where I keep my slim supply of useful info about the place.

Driving out there this morning was only a moderately bad idea, as it turns out. It's not true, strictly speaking, that many Bothans died to bring you this information. There was a bit of sleet coming down now and then, but mostly it was just very cold rain, so that was ok, I guess. I came across the site of an earlier accident on the Gorge highway, but the tow truck had it cleared within minutes of when I got there, and I didn't have to wait long. So that was ok too, or at least it was for me. And the falls were running for once and properly iced up, just as I'd hoped, and some of the photos turned out reasonably ok, or at least semi-fixable in GIMP. (I took a few more with the old Spotmatic, so we'll see how those come out when I have the film developed.) After taking these pics, I then had to scurry back into town for an important meeting with the PHBs. I almost missed it, but didn't, so that was ok as well -- although all things considered, I think I'd rather take "semi-fixable in GIMP" photos in 33-degree sleet than talk to a bunch of clueless PHBs again. All in all, nothing terrible happened this time around. Although I should point out before anyone else does that deliberately driving out to the Gorge while a winter storm watch is in effect is really sort of sub-brilliant. And the drive wasn't my idea of a good time, exactly. Wasn't much fun at all, actually. Yech.

Now that I'm here in my nice, toasty cubicle, with nice, toasty interweb access, I see that oil now costs over $100/barrel. I'm not even going to speculate about a dollar value on this morning's little foray, but under the circumstances I probably won't make a weekly habit of it.

There's another recent photo of the falls (albeit without ice) in this OregonHikers thread. One commenter actually links to my Dalton Falls post as a source of good info, which just goes to show how scarce authoritative info is about the place.

For future reference, the falls are just uphill from milepost 31 (above) on the old Columbia Gorge highway. If you find the milepost and don't see a waterfall directly uphill, the waterfall's gone dry and you'll need to come back some other time.

Above & below, a couple of variations on a "wintry grimness" theme, at the mini-parking lot for the falls. You'd almost think I'd been to art school or something.

The falls from inside a nice, warm car.

Somewhere Near Dalton Falls

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Today's scenic adventure takes us to Dalton Falls, out in the Columbia Gorge yet again [map]. Or at least I think this is Dalton Falls. I could be wrong. It's a highly obscure waterfall that doesn't show up on most maps, and there's no road sign announcing it, even though its base is almost right next to the scenic highway. Oh, and did I mention the falls dry up in the summer? Thus driving out to go search for them isn't foolproof either. In short, what you're reading is what I've been able to piece together and deduce so far. Think of it as a progress report. I'm pretty sure I found the right place, or at least the immediate vicinity of the right place, but I always strive for accuracy here and I'd hate to get the facts wrong. So all I'm claiming right now is that I was somewhere near the falls, and "near" is a very flexible word, you know.

The map link above takes you to WikiMapia this time instead of the usual Google Map. WikiMapia be the only map on the interwebs that gives even a rough idea of where the falls are, and the only reason WikiMapia has them is because I added them. I figured out the location with the slick USGS Topo maps at BackCountryMaps. The USGS maps indicate the falls are at "roughly" 45.57088383381129 latitude, -122.14350700378418 longitude. (I don't know how many of those digits are actually significant.) Before anyone complains, yes, the box on the map includes the parking lot, and the lower cascade, but the main falls are just outside the box. I fat-fingered the box when I drew it and now I can't figure out how to resize the damn thing.

So here's essentially all the useful info I found on the net about Dalton Falls, and there isn't much of it:

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• The page about Dalton Falls from the Northwest Waterfall Survey is the best source of info I've run across. I'd never even heard of them before running across this page.
• Here's a fantastic photo of the falls. The same photographer has a large collection of nice waterfall photos here. I know I tend to apologize for the quality of photos here a lot. Sometimes I'm just being modest and I'm secretly kind of proud of them. But this time I really do have to apologize. How about we all agree today's photos serve a purely documentary purpose, since they aren't very artistic, or even all that visually interesting. And this is after going over them with GIMP, trying to mitigate various exposure and color issues and not always succeeding. You'd think it'd be really hard to take a third-rate photo of a frozen waterfall. In my defense, I'm pretty sure there was shivering involved. Taking a nice photo is great, but taking a mediocre photo really fast and getting back inside the warm toasty car is even better, or at least I was quite certain it was at the time.
• A great page about the Gorge, which includes pics of some "unnamed seasonal waterfalls" in the Gorge. I think some of them are of Dalton Falls, or at least of the place I've rightly or wrongly concluded is Dalton Falls. Others are of Mist Falls, and the falls near the Vista House (which I've seen called "Crown Point Falls" before -- here for example -- although I think it's an unofficial name.)
• The falls get a quick mention in this excerpt from the 1954 book History of Wasco County, Oregon, by William H. McNeal. McNeal raves on and on about the Gorge.
  
  

  
  SHEPHERD'S DELL [sic] was called "the playground of the fairies!" Bridal Veil Falls has no comparison! Coopey and Dalton Falls would be outstanding in any place as would Eagle's Rest! Waukeena Falls and Multnomah Falls are internationally known! Simon Benson gave them to the state as a park! Multnomah Falls is called "the Queen of all American cataracts;" its drop is 870 feet! Some say, "its too beautiful to be real," others say, "a dream garden falls".
  

• OregonWaterfalls.net has a mislabelled photo that's actually of nearby Mist Falls. I'm sure it's Mist Falls, because I've been there, and this is what it looks like. The confusion is understandable, since both falls are very, very obscure, and are just down the road from one another.

There's a gravel parking area at the falls. There's no sign saying what the parking is for, so in the summer you tend to get curious people stopping to look around and getting confused. When the falls aren't running you have some high mossy cliffs next to the scenic highway and that's about it. In my Mist Falls piece, I mentioned there was a larger parking lot a short distance west of the tiny one at Mist Falls, and I didn't know what it was for at the time. Then I saw the Waterfalls Northwest piece, and went back through the archives and found a few instances where I took pics of the falls (I think) without knowing they had a name. Or at least, looking back, I'm pretty sure I took the photos in the general vicinity of Dalton Falls. It's been a while, and I could be wrong in a couple of cases. They basically look right, though, so if I'm wrong, I'm not all that wrong.

Getting there is like getting to Mist Falls. If you're going east and get to Wahkeena Falls (or Mist Falls for that matter, if you can recognize it), you've gone too far east. If you're going west and see the Angels Rest trailhead parking lot, you're too far east. There's some sort of silver box containing railroad equipment at the parking lot, across the street from where the falls are. I don't know how common these boxes are, there may be others all over as far as I know -- so regard this as a necessary but not sufficient condition for finding the place. I'm afraid I didn't get a pic of the parking lot this time, but you might not need one. Either the falls are flowing, in which case you ought to be able to see 'em from the road, or they aren't flowing, in which case there's really no reason to stop at all, that I'm aware of.

As far as I know, the parking lot only gets you access to the base of the falls, which is practically right next to the road. I haven't heard of of any trails going further uphill. If they exist they'd have to be quite steep and thrilling, since you'd likely be hiking them in the winter or spring while the falls are flowing.

Updated 1/9/2021: A couple of addenda to this very old post:

• As I mentioned in a nearly-as-old post in 2008, Dalton Falls is also right next to the old highway's milepost 31 (the post includes a photo of the falls and the milepost, so there's no mistaking it.). So that ought to be a more specific clue than the ones I mentioned above.
• The Northwest Waterfall Survey page I mentioned earlier (link updated) now explains that the name "Dalton Falls" seems to have originally been applied to a different waterfall on the creek immediately east of Angels Rest, which has since picked up the unofficial name "Foxglove Falls", named after a couple of nearby trails. One possible clue in favor of this theory is that the alluvial fan from that creek extends out into the Columbia as Dalton Point, which we visited back in 2018.
• Recreating the HCRH expands on that discussion at length and proposes calling the falls shown in this post "New Dalton Falls".
• A March 2020 WyEast Blog post digs even further into this situation, and proposes names for all the other seasonal falls between Angels Rest and Wahkeena Falls (with included aerial photos of most of them), I guess on the theory that names don't hop around as much if there isn't a vacuum that seems to need filling. The author keeps Dalton Falls on the present-day creek, but splits it into two, Dalton Falls being the tall falls you can see from a distance, and Lower Dalton Falls being the shorter one right up next to the old highway.
• Per the map from the previous item, I think the creek that's home to "Cordial Falls" (the next one west of Dalton) is the same one ODOT called "Mosquito Springs Creek" in a recent press release about a landslide. And west of there by a watershed or two, I think one of the more minor spots he just called "Falls" may be the canyoneering location known as "Devil's Whisper".
• Complicating matters slightly more, there is actually an officially-named Dalton Creek nearby, but it's a minor tributary of Young Creek, which then flows northwest and forms the falls at Shepperds Dell. The USGS coordinates for the creek are due south of the east-of-Angels-Rest creek, so my personal theory is that a data entry error may have crept into the USGS database, either for the 1986 database entry or the 1964 state map it's based on. Just changing the latitude of the official 'source' coordinates from 45.525N to 45.565N moves that point to almost right on the rim of the watershed for that creek. On the other hand, the mysterious "W. Dalton" who's believed to be the namesake of all these places might have been enough of a local bigwig at the time that several unconnected places were named for him or her.
• The naming situation is much clearer for the rocky overhang the falls go over, as it turns out this is a popular local rock climbing spot known as "The Rat Cave". So if you can't find the milepost for whatever reason, like maybe someone stole it to sell on eBay or something, but you do see the overhang, and there's climbing hardware attached to the underside of the overhang (like in this OregonHikers thread), that could be yet another a clue that you're in the right place.