Back in October of last year (2021), I did a post about Perdition Falls, which is an unofficial name for the seasonal waterfall just to the right of Multnomah Falls. In that post I briefly mentioned something about there being another smaller waterfall on the same creek, just upstream and right next to the long-closed Perdition Trail. The trail closure means there's no legal way to visit the upper falls in person. It didn't occur to me that they might be visible from below, at least. But I happened to be at Multnomah Falls last week for lunch and as soon as I got out of my car some dusty weird corner of my brain went "Wait a minute, what's that?". There's really no mistaking it once you know it's there, and as a bonus that makes it easy to tell where the old trail was (and still is, unofficially).
The mildly weird part is that I don't recall ever seeing it before. This is only mildly weird, because my powers of observation are... a bit off. So it's entirely possible I've seen it regularly for years and it just sort of never registered somehow. But it also may have been completely hidden by trees before the 2017 fire, and it seems as though you can only see it from the I-84 parking lot and not from any closer, and I can probably come up with even more excuses if I have to.
In any case, I think I've located the falls on the state LIDAR map right around here, and I used the latitude & longitude from that placemark to create the embedded Google Map here, for anyone who has, I dunno, rocket boots and can get there without using the trail. The advanced technique of clicking around the area on the LIDAR map and guessing what spots might the top and bottom of the falls gives me height numbers in the 20-40 foot range most of the time, with the wide error bar completely due to the human in the loop.
The original dataset has latitude & longitude numbers out to a whopping eleven digits, which I actually had to trim down to six to make Google Maps happy. Which got me wondering just what these decimal places mean in terms of physical distance. One degree latitude comes to about 69 nautical miles, or 111.1 km, anywhere in the world, while the length of one degree longitude varies by latitude: It's the same 111.1 km at the equator, but around 79km at the 45th parallel, and a bit shorter than that in the gorge (the number eventually goes to zero at the poles). Going with the latitude number, one decimal place is 1/10 degree, or 11.1km, while a change in the sixth decimal place is 11.1cm. At eleven decimal places (or 10^-11 degrees), a change in the last digit is a distance of 1111 nanometers, which just so happens to be about one wavelength of near-infrared light of the type typically used in LIDAR. So while 11 digits looks impressive, I'm not sure how many of those are actual significant digits.
So I stumbled off a Google tangent at that point, as I tend to do, so here's a short list of links mostly about lasers that I'm not even going to try to relate back to the subject of this post.
Slides from a Portland State geography class explaining how airborne LIDAR works, aimed at people who might be using the data later in the term.
A 2018 paper calculates theoretical accuracy limits for LIDAR in self-driving cars, and comes up with something around 0.1mm.
A 2019 paper proposes that better resolution can be achieved by ditching the lasers in favor of spooky quantum magic with entangled photons.
Which in turn leads to Wikipedia articles about things like quantum metrology (which LIGO might use someday) and quantum lithography (which might be used in chipmaking someday)
A paper about a specialized Leica camera designed for LIDAR applications. This particular model was from way back in 2011, so it's useful information in case they start showing up at Goodwill or something.
There seems to be a lot of overlap between LIDAR vendors and major defense contractors, so you're always just a few clicks away from stuff like this article. One of the lesser-known Geneva conventions from the 1970s bans using lasers to blind people, and another bans any weapons that cause 'undue suffering'. The article argues that there's a way around these unfortunate legal obstacles, which is to use a laser powerful enough to instantly vaporize whoever it's used on, so they don't suffer first. And no suffering means there's no problem and you can go around lasering people to your heart's delight. Of course those lasers don't actually exist yet, not in airborne form at least, so (as usual) a massive federal research program is needed in order to bring this inspiring dream to life.
Apparently for Halloween 2021 I'm rummaging through draft posts and trying to finish ones that seem vaguely spooky. Like the previous post about the Gorge's Old Boneyard Road, the place we're visiting this time has a semi-spooky name, but beyond that any Halloween connection is a real stretch. This post is also part of our extremely slow virtual hike around the Multnomah-Wahkeena loop, while doing a separate blog post about each individual waterfall on the way. I probably ought to have done this one first, or at least second after Little Multnomah Falls.
Anyway, if you visit Multnomah Falls during the wet season, or any time of the year when it's rained recently, you'll immediately see that the famous waterfall has a less-powerful twin to its right, plummeting over the same cliff into the same pool. I had always sort of figured this twin was a side branch of Multnomah Creek that branched off somewhere above the falls, but it turns out that's not what's going on here at all. It's a whole separate creek with its own little watershed, draining a small area wedged in between Shady Creek and Multnomah Creek proper. This creek burbles along minding its own business until suddenly it falls over a cliff created by its famous and powerful next door neighbor. The two creeks merge in the pool between the two tiers of Multnomah Falls, and it's all downhill from there. The resulting waterfall occasionally goes by the name "Perdition Falls", on the very rare occasions that someone needs to refer to it specifically.
The deal with the spooky-sounding name is actually more straightforward than some of the places we've visited already: It's named (unoffically) after the creek, which in turn is named (unofficially) after the Perdition Trail, a famous cliff's-edge trail connecting the top of Multnomah Falls with the top of Wahkeena Falls and forming a shorter and easier (but very scenic) loop trail as compared to the full Multnomah-Wahkeena one. Unfortunately this trail has been closed to the public since 1996 when it was damaged by one of that year's winter storms. Searching on the name of the trail leads us back to the first time it appeared in print, a July 13th 1919 Oregonian article titled "Zestful Pleasures Afforded by Week-End Hiking Trip". The list of zestful weekend suggestions is a bit on the ambitious side, leading off with climbing Mt. Hood. Which, back then, you could try on a whim, without a permit, and aided only by circa-1919 climbing gear. Or, more reasonably, you could have a go at a long hike to the Gorge's Wahtum Lake and back, starting from either Herman Creek or Eagle Creek.
For people looking to do a bit of serious climbing, the article recommends St. Peter's Dome, east of Multnomah Falls, noting however that (as of 1919) it had never actually been scaled successfully and might never be, though a recent Trails Club expedition had made it as far as the narrow saddle leading out to the mostly-freestanding rock. In fact, as far as anyone knows it was first climbed in 1940, and only occasionally after that; a detailed 2008 account of climbing it notes they were just the twenty-first party to have climbed it and added themselves to the logbook at the summit.
As a less extreme alternative, the article suggests doing the traditional night hike up the Larch Mountain Trail (more about which later), and if you didn't feel like doing the full Larch Mountain trip, there was always the Multnomah-Wahkeena loop, which was laid out essentially identically to the present-day trail; it seems that the high point along this trail used to be called "Looksee Point" back then, and had quite a view, which I imagine is completely obscured by trees now. And if you weren't up for this 5 mile loop, or were just short on time, perhaps the shiny new recently-built Perdition Trail would hit the spot for you. Of it, the article says:
The new trail, inaugurated by the Trails Club, and built ty the city park department, from the head of Multnomah Falls to Wahkeena, is called, for some unknown reason, the Perdition Trail. It is to be avoided in winter, but makes a very pleasant short trip, and affords at the side trail at View Point the most wonderful aspect of Multnomah Falls.
So there you have it: The people who built the trail a century ago gave it a spooky name and never told anyone why, and now they're all dead and we can't badger them about it. It's not a very satisfying answer, but at least now you know as much about the name as anyone alive does, except maybe for a few Trails Club oldtimers, and they aren't talking. But of course we can try to guess what they might have meant by it. The word "perdition" isn't common anymore, and is generally used to mean "hell" or "damnation" or something along those lines, as in the famous rant uttered first by Captain Ahab and again several centuries later by everyone's favorite Star Trek villain:
But it's also an archaic word, and already was in 1919, and it specifically comes across as a bit of corny Old West lingo, like something grizzled mountain men and old-timey prospectors would say. And for them it was more of a general purpose "holy shit", a couple of steps up from plain old "tarnation". So the trail name may come from someone imagining what an early pioneer might have said, hypothetically, on first seeing the view from along the trail. That's my guess, anyway. Speaking as a Generation X person, "tarnation" is an ordinary "whoa", while "perdition" is Keanu saying "whoa".
It was a useful word in the Old West, in that it sounds awfully blasphemous, but saying it wouldn't necessarily get you banned from the local saloon, depending largely on what sort of saloon, and what sort of town, you happen to have moseyed into. You can be certain the word isn't actually blasphemous because it was used in print in a 1995 Deseret News travel article about visiting the Gorge, way back in the olden days when the trail was open, newspapers had travel sections, and travel didn't involve dodging deadly viruses. It's possible there may have been an editorial meeting or two about it first, as the word does have a very specific (and negative) meaning in LDS theology. (See also the 2010 documentary Sons of Perdition, following several teens exiled from the polygamous FLDS communities of southern Utah and northern Arizona. The 2002 film Road to Perdition is unrelated, and stars Tom Hanks as a Depression-era Mob enforcer.)
In truth there are almost no examples on the interwebs of people using the name "Perdition Falls" for the waterfall here, or really of calling it by any specific name at all; there's a caption in someone's Smugmug gallery concerning an illicit hike along the closed trail, and it gets a quick mention in Zach Forsyth's book Waterfalls of the Columbia Gorge, and I could swear I've seen at least one other reference to the name somewhere that I can't find now. So part of the point of the post you're reading now is to create one more search result for people to stumble across, and learn about the long-closed trail, and call their member of Congress about it, and then maybe the necessary repair and redesign work will finally get funded if enough people do that. I figure this is at least worth a try, as the trail has been closed for 25 years now and so far nothing else has worked.
The trail used to have an OregonHikers page, as did the infamous stairwaythat led to the long-term closure. Those links go to Wayback Machine versions of those pages from a few years ago. And just to be really clear, I'm linking to that and other trail info purely for historical reasons, not to encourage people to go give it a try despite the closure. As I understand it, they do actually enforce the closure, and given the trail's location there are decent odds of being noticed from down below if anyone's watching. I guess my standpoint here is that I'm pretty curious about the trail and the area it goes through, but not enough to risk getting tasered over it. Needless to say, I didn't attempt the trail for this post, and if at any point I sound like I know the area, remember I'm going purely on vague childhood memories of hiking it with my parents a few times in the late 1970s or early 80s. So I may have some of the details wrong.
There's still an OregonHikers page for one of the viewpoints, plus a "FAQ" thread and a few
otherforumthreads about the old trail, because I'm by no means the only person who's curious about it. (In one of those threads, a poster refers to Perdition Falls as "Second Multnomah Falls", and includes a photo of a small upper waterfall along the same creek.) And a page at Trailkeepers of Oregon (the parent org behind OregonHikers) explains the group does want to restore the trail someday, albeit as one of several competing priorities. From all of this, I gather there are several problems that would need to be resolved in order to reopen the trail. First would be solving the stairs problem. The original wood stairs burned in the 1991 forest fire, while the heavy concrete replacement stairs sheared off and slid downhill during the 1996 floods, and they either need to find a different way to build stairs here that's more robust, or a way to do it cheaply that can be replaced easily, or maybe a way to reroute the trail so as not require stairs.
The second problem is that people are now worried about debris falling onto the old highway, which runs right along the base of the cliff directly below the trail, either from construction or hikers kicking rocks loose or maybe taking a tumble off the cliff. Although I think this is just a small addition to the inherent, natural rockfall hazard that comes with building a road along the base of a cliff. So maybe the answer is to fix the road, not the trail. I know the highway is historic and people don't want to change anything about it, so this probably won't happen, but it's always easier to find road money than it is to find trail money. And as for altering the nature of the road, it's often said the Columbia River Highway was inspired by the Axenstrasse, an old scenic road in the Swiss Alps, which also gets its share of rockfall issues. The usual solution used there -- and elsewhere across the Alps -- is to build a concrete avalanche gallery above the road to catch falling rocks (see twoexamples, and an engineering paper about a third one and how well it holds up under boulder impacts.) So building one here could maybe be justified that way. Granted these are rather expensive to build, which somehow means that countries of the Alps can afford to build them, and we can't, so as a practical matter this would likely only get funded after a boulder squashes a celebrity. Not that I am seriously proposing this, or have any particular celebrity in mind.
Since I'm talking about the trail in a historical capacity, it did at least show up in local newspapers with regularity. The 1919 article I mentioned above was the first example I found, and it just mentioned the trail in passing. A May 1921 article about the still-new trail goes on and on about it, and gets a bit melodramatic about the three designated viewpoints along the new trail:
Three outstanding vista points have been designated as Flat Fir Point, the Altar of the Gods, and Lonesome Corner. Flat Fir Point is a moss-covered rock with a wind-blown fir flattened against the stone just below it. From here a splendid view may be had up river. The most unique place on the trail is the Altar of the Gods, a great pile of rocks, resembling an ancient place of worship. The altar tops a sheer cliff of several hundred feet. A panorama of the Columbia Gorge is possible from this point.
Lonesome Corner is off by the main trail and is reached by a short side path. The corner is a tiny shelf of rock from which the Multnomah falls may be viewed from the west side. A cable has been anchored in the rocks and placed around a huge fir tree so that visitors may enjoy this hazardous spot with some degree of comfort.
The trail is also mentioned in a somewhat terse 1932 article cataloging interesting hikes around the region. Most items on the list explain how to get to the trailhead by bus or train, which in a lot of cases is no longer possible in 2021. In some cases the route isn't even possible anymore, like a route following Latourell Creek all the way to its source on Pepper Mountain, or the destination has been lost or forgotten, such as a hike along the Sandy River to a "Broughton cairn" somewhere nearby. Broughton being the British naval lieutenant who ventured this far up the Columbia as part of the George Vancouver expedition. This cairn seems to have been sufficiently well-known at the time that the article doesn't explain whether Broughton built it, or if it was just a historical marker indicating about how far upstream he'd gotten to, or what, but I've never heard of it before, and I think I would have if it was a.) authentic and b.) still existed.
A 1946 article about driving up Larch Mountain Road mentions the trail briefly as something else to do while you're in the general vicinity. The article notes that the road was built in 1938 as a WPA project, and was the first road suitable for the general public (as opposed to just log trucks) up there, and explains the once-popular night hike up the Larch Mountain Trail.
The traditional way to do the trail, during its early years, was to start off in the late afternoon or early evening, possibly after a nice dinner at the Multnomah Falls lodge. If you were fast enough you might reach the summit by sunset, but either way you could take in the night sky and Portland city lights in the distance before sleeping under the stars for a few hours. Before you knew it, it would be time for the main event, watching the sunrise from the summit, ideally from the Sherrard Point viewpoint. A photo of the viewpoint at the top shows none of today's safety improvements, by which I mean the concrete slab viewpoint at the top and the safety railing around it. Back then it was just a big rock hanging out into empty space, encircled by distant volcanoes in all (ok, most) directions. I gather watching a sunrise from there would've been the local equivalent of the Haleakala sunrise thing that's still incredibly popular on Maui.
Please note that this adventure is no longer possible as described; there's no view to the west any longer, due to the forest slowly growing back over the past century, and camping at the top is no longer allowed, though you may be able to just get up and drive to the top before the sun comes up. Which is just not the same, somehow. The developed day use area at the top sure looks like a campground, but (like a number of locations around the Gorge, and others west of Mt. Hood) it hasn't been one since sometime in the 70s or 80s. Authorities at the time blamed this on drunk and disorderly campers ruining it for everybody forever, with a side of Reagan-era budget cuts.
The 1946 article mentions that the Larch Mountainn Trail might not be suitable for the elderly, and mentions the Perdition Trail as an alternative for people who aren't up for tackling the main trail. The article shows a photo of the author in knee-deep snow somewhere near the mountaintop, having (I think) gotten there by car, but doesn't explain how he managed that. Maybe the county used to try to keep the road plowed and open all year, though that practice can't have lasted for long before they realized it was futile and expensive. Now they just close the snow gate just past Palmer Mill Road, usually sometime in mid-December, and then it typically stays closed until May.
A 1970 article by the Oregonian's regular hiking columnist said it was a great trail for the whole family, though you might want to consider keeping an eye on the kids at the various sheer clifftop viewpoints, in case you ever wondered what GenX childhoods were like. The article mentions a few long-ago events, like a couple of recent rockfalls at Wahkeena Falls in 1966 and 1969, one of which damaged the bridge at the falls and another took out part of the trail for a while. Also mentions a little-used possibly lost side trail that I'd never heard of before at the last switchback on the way down to Multnomah Falls Lodge, which led to a viewpoint with what was supposed to be the best view of the falls. If you can find that old trail somehow in 2021, an can make it to the viewpoint, we're told that the light is just right for a great photo right around 11am.
The trail is mentioned in a 1983 Oregonian article as an alternate route for through-hiking the gorge, on the parts of the Gorge Trail that had been completed at the time. It mentions the long-stalled initiative to have the trail start in Troutdale and continue to Hood River and points east from there. As of 2021 the only concrete product of this initiative is the obscure dead-end trail that heads a couple of miles east from Lewis & Clark State Park before just sort of petering out mid-forest.
The old trail is mentioned as a great place to view fall foliage, in 1985 Oregonian article by Don & Roberta Lowe, authors of the definitive Northwest trail guidebooks from that era. The fall foliage angle is also covered in a 1998 Kitsap Sun article, which mentions the trail along with a number of closer-to-home waterfalls in the North Cascades along Washington's US 2. The trail was already closed at that point, but at first everyone sort of assumed the closure was temporary and the trail would be repaired and back open before you knew it. You can see this in an account of hiking it in 1998. That link goes to someone's personal pages at the University of Hawaii, which I've linked to several times before for various hikes around Oʻahu like the Lanikai Pillboxes hike.
More recently, here's a
trail report from 2011. Also people posted some old photos of it under the hashtag #gorgememory around the time of the Eagle Creek fire in 2017. I also ran across a photo of an old sign for the trail, over on the Wahkeena Falls side, on a site that's just about fonts used in (mostly US) park and trail signage. As far as I know the sign is still there despite the long closure, possibly because the sign itself is considered historic and can't legally be removed.
So that's a bit of background on the trail, but this post is about the falls, and sadly the name "Perdition Falls" has never appeared in local newspapers, and "Perdition Creek" appears precisely once, in an 1863 Oregonian editorial trying to persuade local farmers not to abandon their farms and run off to the latest gold rush. And the name is used not in connection with the creek here, but as a ridiculous gold rush place name along with other gems like "Satan's Ravine" and "the Devil's Diggings".
The fact that I've got basically no details about the falls or the creek, and limited info about the old trail, doesn't mean there aren't a ton of search hits on these names. Oh no, and these links go to all sorts of things. Here's a quick sampling of some other results that came back:
A current series of fantasy novels set in the small town of Perdition Falls in upstate New York (book 1 published in March 2020)
There are also search hits out there for "Perdition Valley", like the eponymous 76th book in the long-running "Deathlands" series of post-nuclear adventure novels. I vaguely remember those from the 1980s, but apparently the series has continued to the present day, now in a purely audiobook form and aimed at the long-distance trucker market.
While trying to find interesting stuff about the falls and related topics, I figured at least a few people out there must have been curious about the waterfall right next to Multnomah Falls without knowing any of its unofficial names or nicknames, so I tried searching on phrases like "next to multnomah falls" and "right of multnomah falls", and found a few mostly unrelated results, given all the different meanings "next to" can have. The Multnomah Falls lodge, Benson Bridge, and Wahkeena Falls cover most of the top hits, while the long tail of search results includes all manner of things:
"Next to" as in immediately next to, and rappelling down a 600' rope. Normally this is Highly Frowned Upon, and more to the point, it would be impossible to do this quietly and get away with it without anyone noticing. But this was for an official search-and-rescue demonstration, so they had a special permit that mere mortals get laughed at for trying to request.
"Next to", as in the next interesting hike to the east of Multnomah Falls, namely the dreaded Elevator Shaft trail. I've never actually done this trail, but it's on my TODO-someday list, at whatever point I'm in about the same shape as 2019. This post originally said something about trying again once Trail 400 was open again after the long closure due to the Eagle Creek Fire, COVID, and then a bunch of winter landslides along the old highway. (This is the trail that branches off the Larch Mountain Trail not far after the Benson Bridge; an old sign at the junction calls it the "Ak-Wanee Trail" but that name never really caught on.) I tried to at least have a look at the base of the trail back in June but after a short distance Trail 400 became so overgrown that you couldn't see your own feet, and the mud bog of a trail beneath all the brush was very slippery, and a slip could mean a long tumble down a steep slope. So I immediately bailed on that idea for the time being.
The previous item reminded me of a proposal that was briefly considered in 1924 to build an actual elevator next to Multnomah Falls, for the convenience of visitors who didn't feel like walking to the top.
"Next to", as in the ugly (but effective) cable fencing next to the initial bit of trail up to Benson Bridge, which had to be installed after the 1991 fire to prevent rockslides onto the trail. The phrase occurs in a 2019 paper presented at that year's meeting of the Association of Environmental & Engineering Geologists. That paper seems relevant to where things stand in the Gorge right now, and I think quoting the full abstract counts as fair use, so:
Forest Fires and Slope Stability in a Rain Forest: Lessons Learned from the 1991 Forest Fire in the Columbia Gorge, Oregon, USABurns, Scott, Portland State University, *****@pdx.edu (TS #13)
In the late summer of 1991, there was an extensive forest fire in the Columbia Gorge, USA, on the Oregon side of the river that was started
naturally by lightning. We learned from this fire that this steep terrain underwent three basic erosion/landslide processes in the next ten
years as a result of the fire. After the fire was out in the autumn, the first rains brought abundant surface erosion of burnt soil and vegetation. A lot of this ended in the streams. Second, extensive enhanced rock fall occurred in the burned area. One classic area was next to Multnomah Falls where a Brugg cable fence had to be installed to protect the trail leading to Benson Bridge from rock fall onto hikers. Third, we learned that in a period of 5–10 years after the forest fire, areas of intensive burning of the forest would produce very large debris flows. It takes 5–10 years for the roots of the trees burned to disintegrate. Seven large debris flows in 1996 at Dodson and one large one near there in 2001 are examples of this delayed debris flow generation when a “Pineapple Express” would come into the area. This is a rain forest getting over 60 inches of precipitation per year. This differs from dry climate forest fires where debris flows are generated with the first major storm after the fire. After the 2017 Gorge fire—which also occurred on the Oregon side—was started by two teenagers, we noted the same things. First, there was extensive surface erosion for a week after the first rainfall. Also, all of the roads and trails were closed until checked for rock fall hazards. We now expect debris flows in the next 5–10 years to come down the following drainages that had extreme burning in the headwaters: Tanner Creek, Eagle Creek, Oneonta Creek, and Horsetail Creek.
"Next to", as in one of the top two tourist attraction in the Gorge next to Multnomah Falls. Which is what civic boosters in Cascade Locks are hoping the Bridge of the Gods might become, once they manage to add a pedestrian walkway to it. As of 2018, it was thought this could be ready by 2022-23 if the Port of Cascade Locks could find the money for it. But the project is stalled right now due to some sort of arcane federal rules about it being a toll bridge -- even though it doesn't charge tolls for pedestrians, bikes, or horses, who would be the only users of the pedestrian addition.
"Next to", as in the 2nd highest waterfall in Oregon next to Multnomah Falls. About which, opinions vary widely. The Bend Bulletin and various others say the silver medal goes to SaltCreekFalls , in the Cascades off OR-58 near Oakridge. But it turns out that Watson Falls, on a tributary of the North Umpqua, east of Roseburg, is juuust a few feet taller than Salt Creek Falls, per a 2009 remeasurement. Which ironically is mentioned on the Salt Creek wiki page but not its own.
Waterfalls Northwest inevitably has a tallest waterfalls list for the state, which puts Watson at a distant 14th and Salt Creek at 15th. That list includes a few sorta-prominent seasonal waterfalls like Dalton Falls, but no mention of Perdition Falls. It drops from roughly the same height as the upper tier of Multnomah Falls, maybe even a few feet higher thanks to less erosion, and hits the pool between the upper & lower Multnomah tiers at essentially the same height. If we go with the standard height for the upper tier, 542' puts it a solid 4th after Linton Falls in Lane County and Alkali Falls in Douglas County near Crater Lake, and just ahead of Mist Falls, the second-to-next falls west of Multnomah. Although height numbers for Mist Falls vary by quite a bit, as discussed in my old post about the falls, with one outlier crediting it as a full 1200' feet high.
On the other hand, Salt Creek Falls is just down the trail from Too Much Bear Lake, and the other candidates aren't, which really ought to count for something.
Meanwhile the only result I found for "right of multnomah falls" actually refers to the correct place, and it's someone in an ice climbing forum gazing sort of wistfully at it; from what I know about the sport, this would be an ideal climbing spot -- a nice clean 500+' stretch of ice, with just the right winter volume that it might actually freeze all the way top to bottom, and without any weird dangers or obstacles. The only problem is that (like I noted above) climbing here is highly illegal thanks to the famous waterfall next door, and access to the top of the falls is illegal due to the Perdition Trail situation, and access to the base is also illegal due to the big Multnomah Falls rockslide in the 90s, and furthermore you'd be climbing in an extremely public fishbowl and somebody would notice you and call 911 because reasons, and you'd end up getting droned over it or something, which is absolutely not the kind of danger you had in mind going in.
I do have an alternate theory about the trail closure, and why the feds apparently have zero interest in ever fixing the trail. And before you go "oh great, this is another sasquatch story, isn't it?", let me stop you right there and confirm your suspicions. We've already established that Ecola Falls -- less than a mile upstream on Multnomah Creek -- was once the center of the Sasquatch whaling industry, which is how the odd name of the place came about. This time we have a much more recent story, as the closure is the result of a unique partnership between the US Forest Service and the NHL Players Association, specifically their pension & retirement office. It's a widely-known open secret that sasquatches have always been present in the top tiers of professional hockey, and at times have dominated the sport, as with the Philadelphia Flyers teams of the 1970s, and the Portland Rosebuds of the early 20th Century, who owned the Stanley Cup for about a month in 1916. This is actually the main reason the NHL won't give us an expansion team to replace the Rosebuds, because we would instantly have an unfair avantage thanks to recruiting the local wildlife. (You might wonder why Seattle now has an NHL expansion team given that rule; the answer of course is that Seattle has tons of billionaires and when one of them wants something, it generally can't be stopped.)
Back in the 1980s and 1990s you started to see awkward media stories about how various retired NHL stars were faring after retirement, featuring disheveled ex-defensemen wandering around half-wrecked LA mansions in a state of bewilderment. What the stories didn't tell you was that in addition to the usual wear and tear after long NHL careers, many of these guys were feeling the call of the wild, and could not experience inner peace without returning to the forest. Early experiments went badly as they were shunned by the Sasquatch society they'd rejected decades earlier, lured away by the lights of the big city and dreams of fame and fortune. Also they'd become acclimated to human food, specifically 1970s hockey arena food, and the traditional fare of roots and berries and grubs wasn't really cutting it. So they set up a retirement zone a short stroll from the Multnomah Falls lodge, so every evening around twilight a few small groups of hairy elderly dudes emerge from the forest and shamble down to the lodge to pick up their usual take-out orders. Barrel of chili cheese fries (vegetarian), crate of onion rings, crate of nachos, frosty keg of Michelob, etc., So the ongoing trail closure is just so they can have a little peace and quiet, and the government coverup is mostly to keep autograph seekers away. Incidentally, pro hockey isn't the only sasquatch-dominated sport out there, for example many of the most famous pro wrestlers of the 80s were at least part sasquatch. The difference is that the hockey 'squatches have a strong union that looks out for their interests in their later years, while the wrestlers never did and still don't.
Ok, it's time for the next stop on our ongoing (and very slow) virtual hike around the Multnomah-Wahkeena Loop. The Larch Mountain Trail (which we've been on so far, other than the detour over to Little Multnomah Falls) has a junction with the Wahkeena Trail at the 1.8 mile mark, and right around that point Multnomah Creek goes over a cluster of 5'-10' drops, maybe 35' overall. It's a pleasant enough spot, though not one of the scenic highlights of the trip, and I was surprised to learn it's been saddled with the name "Upper Multnomah Falls", a name that leads to all sorts of unmet expectations. After figuring this out, I went back and found that I'd taken photos of it on at least three separate occasions, never thinking "hey, cool waterfall", just that it was an especially photogenic spot along the creek. Still, it had a name (albeit a dumb one), and I had photos of it, and that meets what I admit is a low bar to be included here, so here we are.
The name made it harder to research this post than it needed to be, since the majority of places we've visited in this project have been called "Upper Multnomah Falls" at some point or other, and the one we're visiting now is way more obscure than any of these others. Once you wade through all of the irrelevant search results, there isn't a lot of material left out there on the interwebs. Because I'm hanging out at home with the cat during a pandemic, I went ahead and waded through said results. You'd think this would've been a quick and easy post to write once I was done collecting every last thing I could possibly find on the internet about this little spot. But no, it ended up as a lengthy depth-first exploration of every last side diversion I've bumped into along the way -- again because pandemic -- none of which I can quite bring myself to delete. I am at least slowly learning to kick stuff down to the footnotes when it doesn't relate to the main point of a post, though, the first footnote being an extended bit about the name, and where it came from, and when, and why you probably haven't heard of it. The TL;DR is that the waterfall (and the use of the name here) may have originated with a 1983 guidebook, and then it largely fell out of favor by the mid-2000s. As far as I know the waterfall itself did not change at all during this time, and this is all just people having opinions and a consensus slowly shifting over a few decades.
In any case, the Upper Multnomah we're visiting right now does have one minor claim to fame. There's an undated infographic I've run across a few times that explains that there are precisely eight kinds of waterfall out there in the world [footnote: 'geology'], and you can collect the whole set just by visiting a few spots in the Gorge. In particular, you can see five of the eight just by doing the Multnomah-Wahkeena Loop, with Upper Multnomah here representing the "cascade" variety. (Hiking to Triple Falls from the Horsetail trailhead will get you two of the remaining three, and you can finish off the set at the first falls on Eagle Creek, fwiw.) The standard caption for cascade-type waterfalls explains this variety "[t]umbles along a series of rock steps. You'll find a fine model by following the directions to Dutchman Falls, then hiking 0.2 of a mile (a total of 1.9 miles from the trailhead) to Upper Multnomah Falls, near the junction with Wahkeena Trail #420.". Here are a few contemporary examples of where this infographic has showed up:
A visitor pamphlet given out at the Vista House, though it mangles the description a bit as of the most recent (July 2020) version.
So my personal theory, which I can't prove, is that the name was bestowed here and persists because of this grand tour of waterfall types. There are probably dozens of similar spots around just the Oregon side of the Gorge where some creek drops at least X number of feet over a distance of no more than Y feet, for whatever threshold values of X and Y you've picked out, and almost none of them have names, but this one gets singled out because it's on a route visitors would be on anyway on their way from the "Block" example at Dutchman Falls, and the "Fan" example at Fairy Falls over on Wahkeena Creek, or vice versa.
Some assorted sightings of the falls from around the interwebs:
Oregon Hikers Field Guide has a nice pre-fire photo titled "UpperMultnomahFalls.jpg", used but not named in the Larch Mountain Trail article .
It also gets mentioned in passing in a few of their forum threads:
A post in this thread calls it the "Rodney Dangerfield of Multnomah Creek Waterfalls"
This one includes an artsy photo labeled Upper Multnomah but which might be Little Multnomah; it's hard to be sure because artsy.
Another thread says it was actually impressive when they visited, unusually, but they didn't take a photo
Someone else was unusually impressed by it in a 2013 thread, and included a nice photo.
Yet another thread miscaptions Little Multnomah as Upper, but also has a photo of the "real" Upper Multnomah. I think. It can be hard to tell from some angles.
A few more photos by various Flickr users, found either by name or by geotag, at least some of which seem to be of the same spot I keep taking photos of: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]
Someone's blog post with a bunch of Boy Scout hiking photos, including a view of Upper Multnomah taken while doing the Multnomah-Wahkeena Loop.
Someone else's 'I should take a photo of that' photo, part of a longer hike, including stopping by Nesika Lodge, and the weird trail with the christmas ornaments and/or toothbrushes somewhere up in Multnomah Basin. Fwiw if you happen to be in that area, there's also a long-abandoned 1931 Buick up there somewhere, though I've personally never bothered to go looking for it. Just not my thing, I guess.
An undated OregonWaterfalls.net photo captioned "Upper Multnomah" doesn't quite look like the place pictured in the blog post, but it might still be the same from a different angle.
Was also mentioned on a somewhat idiosyncratic list of waterfalls at The Columbia Experience. I'm not 100% sure he's talking about the same place, but the list is mostly ordered geographically, east to west, then north to south, and it's in the right location in the list anyway. Though Dutchman and Little Multnomah are swapped, and the whole Wahkeena list is swapped with the Multnomah list, so who knows.
Oh, and I did find one possible historical photo, in a 1924 issue of The Camera. The magazine featured a monthly Print Criticism section, in which you -- the hopeful reader -- could submit a photo, and the magazine's team of experts would make fun of it (and you) to a national audience. But at least a small copy of your photo would be seen by a national audience, which is fantastic if you believe the old adage about there being no such thing as bad publicity. Here's what the critics had to say:
“Leaping Waters”, by B.G. Smith.
We have no doubt but that this subject looked most beautiful to the artist. He looked at it with a poetic eye, as his title betrays, but the glamour of the theme veiled his eyes to its lack of pictorial interest. He fails to do even justice to the facts, because he surrounds them with so much uninteresting matter that these surroundings become of more importance as space fillers than the falls itself. There is everything here one could want to make a picture with, the falls, the dominant feature, but by the failure to identify interest where it is demanded, we have, instead of a picture, a mere mass of conglomerated areas of almost equal intensity, and a mere bit of white supposed to represent the beautiful falls, no separation of the planes whatever. Everything in the one vertical plane, no depth or distance. Had the photographer, first of all, studied the proper angle of light, we would have had the water of the falls look like agitated water instead of wool, and the quiet pool transparent, instead of an ink well. We do not know whether the photographer was pleased with his results or not. We credit him, however, with enough taste not to be — and that he sent the subject to get our opinion of it. Our suggestion is to try it again, but spend the whole day if necessary to get it pictorially.
Made on the Larch Mountain Trail with a Korona view camera equipped with a Goerz f/6.8 lens. The exposure was 1/10 second in the shade at 2:30 P.M. in September; Eastman cut film developed with pyro; print on Artura.
Ouch! Sadly the scanned copy of the magazine is too dark and lo-res to form a fair opinion of the photo, quality-wise. On one point of the critique, a 1/10 second exposure of any waterfall made by anyone, will tend toward the "wool" look as they call it, not agitated waters. And given the slow film speeds of 1924, and the lens's max aperture of f/6.8, and how rarely you get direct sunlight in the Gorge's north-facing canyons, giving them their agitated waters might not have been as easy as just hanging around the right spot waiting for inspiration to strike. Besides, the "wool" look is now the standard aesthetic for quality photos of Gorge waterfalls and it's been that way at least as far back as the 1960s Ray Atkesonphoto books. So a big "pshaw" to the whole agitated waters thing. I do think Smith could have improved his photo by cropping it a bit, though. Although it's not as if I usually bother with that for my Flickr photosets, so take that with an appropriately-sized grain of salt, I guess.
And just as a little curveball, another OregonHikers thread I ran across includes a map that places an "Upper Multnomah Falls" another mile upstream around the point where the Larch Mountain Trail splits into Low and High Water routes, and a "Double Falls" maybe 1/4 mile downstream, and nothing at the Wahkeena trail junction. I don't recall seeing anything that looked like a waterfall upstream of the one here, and I think I would have noticed one, but I've been wrong before. Multiple times, even. I suppose I'll have to go look again after the pandemic's over.
If you do any sort of search for the phrase "Upper Multnomah Falls", nearly all of the results will be for the upper tier of Multnomah Falls (here for example, and here.), which -- to me -- is the most logical place to apply the name. But it's also an old name for the Wiesendanger Falls & Ecola Falls combo, so there are a few results for both of them as well, like this page , and this circa-1992 jigsaw puzzle, sold nationwide, and most of the then-canonical guidebooks by Don & Roberta Lowe. Their original 100 Oregon Hiking Trails (1969) didn't use the name, but the ones that followed did, starting with 70 Hiking Trails - Northern Oregon Cascades (1974) and running thru at least the late 1980s. A few other search results point at Little Multnomah Falls (like thesephotos), I guess on the entirely reasonable theory that it's right above regular Multnomah Falls so it must be the upper one.
The earliest use I've found of "Upper Multnomah Falls" for this modest spot is in Gregory Plumb's 1983 guidebook Waterfalls of the Pacific Northwest, which evolved into the long-running A Waterfall Lover's Guide to the Pacific Northwest, published in five editions (so far) beginning in 1989. The 1989 Waterfall Lover's Guide is the earliest version Google Books has, and it (like the 1983 book) describes the falls briefly, rating it at one star out of a possible five: "This 15-to-20-foot drop can be viewed from Larch Mountain Trail #441 about 0.2 mile past Double Falls (see directions above), a total of 1.8 miles from the trailhead near the junction with Wahkeena Trail #420.". The book's present-day companion website also has a page for the falls, still rating it as a single star.
I haven't found any examples of it being called anything else before 1983, or of it being singled out as anything special apart from all the other rapids and cascades above Ecola Falls. The book doesn't claim to have originated using the name here, but any prior uses of it don't seem to be online anywhere. The one-star rating is a common theme, as you'll see in a bit here; I think it gets docked points due to a) not measuring up to the grand-sounding name, and b) being compared to everything visitors have just walked by on the way there. In many US states it would qualify as a major local tourist attraction on its own merits. (I was originally going to make a wisecrack here about waterfalls in Kansas, but then I googled it, and then a few other even flatter states, and (because pandemic) that particular tangent became another footnote.)
The undated infographic I mentioned up above might be older than 1983, but I can't prove it. Oregon Off The Beaten Path was first published in 1991, though I don't know whether it used the graphic before 2005, and the hand-drawn illustrations of 'generic' examples of each waterfall type are in a style that to me looks very 1970s or early 1980s.
The 1998 guidebook Romance of Waterfalls mentioned the falls briefly in its Hidden Falls (aka Ecola Falls) entry, saying that from there it was ".2 miles, 10 minutes to Upper Multnomah Falls, a rather insignificant falls which is often barely noticeable under logjams". Later on the entry explains "We have chosen not to include Upper Multnomah Falls, a few minutes upstream from Hidden Falls, in the book. It's an artistic judgement. Take a look anyway, and decide if we did the right thing."
The Northwest Waterfall Survey once had a listing for it, per a December 2001 Wayback Machine snapshot, said "Though there isn't any "real" waterfall past Hidden Falls, as long as you're here, you may as well walk the .2 mile from Hidden Falls to this rather sad little drop along Multnomah Creek.". Because this was posted close to twenty years ago, the page's hint to photographers said "Don't waste film here like I did (unless you need to finish a roll)." A 2006 version of the page mellowed out a bit toward the little waterfall, albeit while explaining it shouldn't be in the datatabase at all:
While the last major waterfall along Multnomah Creek is technically Ecola Falls, the stream beyond is exceptionally scenic, pockmarked with small drops here and there. This 10 foot ledge is the largest of those. This drop is included in here more as a disambiguation than anything else. Future overhauls to this database will see this entry removed.
...
Photography Tips:
This one is scenic, worth taking pictures of, but not necessarily as an illustrative waterfall scene.
And sure enough, no trace of it remains in the present-day database. I think they came up with the 10' height by just counting the single tallest drop and not the ones immediately above or below it.
As I mentioned above, Upper Multnomah would qualify as a majorwaterfall in Kansas on its own merits, and possiby as an important visitor attraction, or at least a local swimming hole. Note that I am not making fun of Kansas here, just noting things are always graded on a curve, and Kansas has a different set of local standards. For one thing, some of the ones listed in the two links above are artificial ones including dam spillways and others where water just sort of finds a different, natural-looking path out of a reservoir, and a 3' drop is worth writing about if it looks impressive enough otherwise. The deal is that while the state certainly looks flat, it's kind of tilted like a table with a bum leg. So the highest point in the state is tongue-firmly-in-cheek Mt. Sunshine, on the Colorado border, at 4309 feet above sea level, while the lowest point is somewhere on the Oklahoma border at 679 feet elevation. 3630 feet is equivalent to Multnomah Falls stacked on top of Yosemite's El Capitan, but it's barely noticeable when spread out evenly over the width of the state.
A news item out of Chicago points out that Kansas is only the seventh-flattest state, with Florida in the lead and Illinois taking second; it reads kind of like they're proud of the fact. That article is based on a 2014 paper "The Flatness of US States" by two University of Kansas geographers, one of whom describes the work here. So I wondered what the six ahead of Kansas had in terms of waterfalls, and got to googling, because pandemic.
Florida. Most search results on Google Maps named something-something falls are retirement communities, garden stores, or tourist traps, but I did find a few results, largely concentrated in the panhandle or the stretch along the Georgia border:
Boonie Falls just 3', between Orlando & Cape Canaveral. Naming a 3' waterfall seems absurd if you've never been to this part of Florida, but it really is that flat. I might actually go track this one down the next time I'm in Florida, since it's the only part of Florida I visit on anything close to a regular basis, due to rocket launches.
Falling Waters Falls, a whopping 73' but flow depends on having rained recently, and water is falling into a deep sinkhole
Illinois has several completely normalones; I guess the deal is that they're concentrated in the far southern tip of the state, the rest of which is pancake-flat.
North Dakota has exactlyonewaterfall, according to the internet, and it's... not spectacular. This actually surprises me, given the (relatively) rugged and remote western end of the state, home to a two-part national park. But if there are any others, either nobody's talking about them or nobody's discovered them yet. I would have expected a colorful tall tale about it, like Teddy Roosevelt somehow lassoed it, or bested it in a fistfight, and then had a change of heart and decided it needed protecting.
Louisiana waterfalls tend to be of the trickle of water going over a low cliff variety; I was prepared for them to not be very tall, but I somehow thought Louisiana had more running water than what you see in the given examples. But ok. Lots of good writeups though, so clearly the local demand for waterfalls seems to outstrip the supply by a great deal.
And then there's mysterious Odum Falls, which is said to exist somewhere on a large military base near Nachitoches, LA. There seem to be no photos of it online anywhere, though; it could be the Niagara Falls of West Louisiana and nobody would ever know. Maybe the whole military base is a decoy, and the real secret base is entirely behind the waterfall. Maybe that's where they hide the aliens. The truth is out there, amirite?
Minnesota not only has waterfalls, it has some that are major tourist attractions, despite the state not being famous for majestic snow-capped mountains. Which kind of kills the "flat = boring" hypothesis. Downtown Minneapolis has the Falls ofSaint Anthony on the Mississippi River, along with at least two significantfalls in the wider metro area. A few things around the rest of the state:
Delaware is the only state that legitimately seems to have no real waterfalls at all. The top search hit I found is a Wikipedia list of waterfalls in the Delaware Water Gap, a scenic stretch of the Delaware River north of Philadelphia that forms part of the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border and does not include a single square inch of the state of Delaware.
Waterfalls in Delaware at Michele's Waterfall Page came up with precisely two, a "Rockland Falls" and some unnamed bits of whitewater on a creek near the Wilmington zoo. The World Waterfall Database only lists Rockland Falls, and lists it as "Disqualified" seeing as it's the collapsed remnant of an old mill dam. This actually puts Delaware behind Washington DC, which has half of Little Falls on the Potomac (which the World Waterfall Database says is "Disqualified", though DC opinion seems to run the other way, with articles calling it a "natural wonder" and a hidden treasure"), plus an old mill dam in Rock Creek Park.
The "eight kinds of waterfall" model is by no means the only way to slice and dice the subject, oh no; two Wikipedialists add a few more types to the jumble (but not the same ones), both citing a page that came up with 28 varieties for people to argue over. Meanwhile the Northwest Waterfall Survey folks came up with a 5x8 matrix classifying things by steepness and how it interacts with the surface it's flowing over. Which would give you 40 flavors, except that close to a third of the combinations are impossible (a clue the two axes are not quite independent variables), so with those removed they're back to 28, but a different 28 than the set Wikipedia relies on. And of those, the three in the 'Talus' row -- meaning the water's flowing down loose rocks or boulders -- don't meet their definition of what a waterfall is and are either not listed at all, or are tagged as "Disqualified", which seems a bit on the harsh side.
Also found a page on classifying waterfalls in Finland. It turns our they are basically like US waterfalls, except that you have health care if you get hurt exploring them.
I was sort of expecting to bump into something a bit more academic than those, but I haven't. Although it turns out the author of the Waterfall Lover's Guide is a professor of cartography and geography at a university in Oklahoma, and Google Scholar says the book has been cited at least eight times, along with another three citations for Waterfalls of the Pacific Northwest, the book's 1983 predecessor. Also here's a 1993 paper of his (PLUMB, GA. "A scale for comparing the visual magnitude of waterfalls." Earth-science reviews 34.4 (1993): 261-270, 14 citations), which the Northwest Waterfall Survey cites as an inspiration for their rating algorithm. I'm kind of curious about the math, even though my general rule is that if your rating system has decimal points, you might be taking things too seriously. I am not sure how the math works, though, because the journal is an Elsevier one and they want about $40 for a PDF of the paper. Which I could afford, except that academic publishing is a grift and my tax dollars are already subsidizing those parasites quite handsomely, and in short we aren't going any deeper down the math rabbit hole. Watch as this theme develops further throughout this footnote.
The original 1983 book came two years before the paper that I keep seeing cited as the first to treat waterfalls as something serious geologists can write papers about: Young, R. W. "Waterfalls: form and process." Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie. Supplementband 55 (1985): 81-95. I gather it's in English despite the long German journal name, but I couldn't find a copy of it online, or a tech-savvy publisher who'd deign to gouge me for a PDF of it. I even approached it like a Real Scientist and tried searching Sci-Hub for a 'bootleg' copy but couldn't find it there either, so either they don't have it, or they do but it has the wrong sort of unique ID and I can't search for it. (Adapting an old tech joke, the great thing about unique IDs is that there are so many to choose from.) I could maybe check my local university library, local being just blocks from here, to see if they have a print copy, but it's currently closed because of the ongoing global pandemic.
1985 seems awfully recent given that people have been doing geology for centuries, but waterfalls don't tell you anything about earthquakes, and they don't show you where to drill for oil, or mine for coal, or feed into any other sort of practical concern that drives grant money. The old trope about hidden treasure behind waterfalls is rarely true in real life, unless maybe you count geocaches, which I don't. Enough people found it useful, though, that Google Scholar shows 58 citations for it. (Note: I have no idea whether 58 is a lot for a 35-year-old paper of this sort.) Most of the papers citing it seem to be about erosion processes, and some about their economic value for attracting tourists. Here are a few that caught my eye, and some tangents they led to, because I do that:
"The Naming of Waterfalls" caught my eye, as something potentially (and regrettably) relevant to my interests. The publisher wants $42 to download a PDF, though you can read it online for 48 hours for $7, or... obtain one via Sci-Hub here (though that URL is likely to break as the copyright police pursue Ms. Elbakyan around the globe like a sciencey Carmen Sandiego).
An open access paper exploring whether seepage from underground springs could pack enough of a punch to erode a canyon in solid rock on its own. This has been proposed as one possible origin of canyons on Mars that wouldn't require any water flowing on the planet's surface. Terrestrial analogs in Colorado and Hawai'i suggest the answer is a big no, and in the Hawaiian case you don't get an erosional valley without a waterfall at the head of it. One of the cited examples is 'Akaka Falls on the Big Island, which this humble blog 'visited' back in 2012, although the photos are from late 2000 and most of the post is about working at a dot-com company back in the day, since they paid for that particular Hawai'i trip. So the takeaway here is that there might have once been waterfalls on Mars, although they haven't identifed any specific spots where they might have been. This, if true, does not quite imply the existence of ancient Martian blogs temporarily focusing on the local waterfalls, but it would satisfy one of the necessary preconditions.
Speaking of which, back in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a lot of speculation about what NASA's Cassini probe, and its European passenger the Huygens lander, would find at Saturn's mysterious moon Titan. As hypothesized, the moon does have seas and rivers of extremely cold liquid methane and ethane, leading some planetary scientists to wonder if there might be waterfalls too, or whatever they'd be called when the flowing liquid isn't water. This led to concept art and even simulations of what such an alien waterfall might sound like. As luck would have it, Huygens happened not to land near any seas or rivers so the earliest this particular question might be answered is 2036 when NASA's Dragonfly octocopter arrives, though they don't plan to visit the moon's liquid parts. Back in the early 2010s NASA seriously considered sending a boat to drift around of the major seas, and has even studied sending a submarine someday. The problem, of course, is that planning for and then going to Saturn takes decades, and you can't plan followup visits until after you do that, and as a recently-minted 50-something I see some of the proposed dates and realize how old I'll be at that point and have to wonder how much more Saturn exploration I'll actually get to see. As one more data point, a recent design study on making a return visit to Pluto would launch in 2031 and arrive in 2058(!), just five years before Zefrem Cochrane is supposed to invent warp drive and meet some Vulcans, presumably making the little Pluto robot instantly obsolete.
Um, anyway, here's "Conservation value of waterfalls as habitat for lotic insects of
western Victoria, Australia", concerning Australian insect species that are 'waterfall specialists' and live nowhere else, making them biodiversity hotspots that might need protecting. The Columbia Gorge has a few insect species like that too, so this paper took me down another tangent that I pushed off to another footnote. Yes, this footnote has a footnote of its own. I have not yet achieved a state of footnotes all the way down, but it's a start.
For anyone who's actually clicking through to any of those things, you'll see the word "knickpoint" a lot. Which is kind of a silly word, but it's a technical term in geology, meaning a point where the angle of a river or channel changes sharply. Bent one way, your stream goes over a cliff and you have a waterfall, or at least you get some rapids, depending on the angle, while bent the other way you get a lake. In neither of these cases do you get amazing deals on licensed NBA merchandise, though you might as well check the outlet mall in Troutdale while you're in the area, if that's your thing. In any case, I must have asked Google about "knickpoint oregon" or "knickpoint portland" at some point because the next few links I have are about that.
A brief item titled "River Knickpoints: Distinguishing Between Mobile and Fixed Steps in River Channels" explains that some knickpoints are mobile (over geological time) due to erosion, while others basically aren't because erosion has bumped up against harder rocks that the eroding body of water can't make any headway against. The latter case is illustrated by waterfalls in the Oregon Coast Range, where various creeks and rivers have eroded through local sandsone until they bumped up against volcanic basalt and have been stuck at that point ever since.
A 2018 masters thesis on rapid erosion at Bull Mountain in the suburban Portland area kind of illustrates the 'mobile' knickpoint variety. This doesn't imply there are actual waterfalls at Bull Mountain; if there were, there would be upscale subdivisions with 'Falls' in the name, named for the developer's kids or current trophy wife, and the houses would be at least twice as expensive.
A 1998 article in Oregon Geology (a publication of Oregon's Department of Geology & Mineral Industries) mostly about sediments in the tualatin valley, points out that the Tualatin River has a knickpoint 2.8km upstream of where it flows into the Willamette River, which I gather is unusually close. It seems the river is flowing over Columbia River Basalt when it gets to West Linn, the same rock that forms Portland's West Hills, and the river isn't powerful enough to erode the rock very well, so the knickpoint hasn't really moved since the Missoula Floods 13,000 years ago, and thus the river is quite flat above it. The article references a 1969 paper that argued the whole Tualatin Valley is technically a hanging valley above the Willamette due to this situation. All due to what -- to a layperson -- looks like a series of innocuous gentle rapids from that point to the Willamette, just upstream from Willamette Falls. Parts of these rapids can be seen from West Linn's Fields Bridge Park and Swiftshore (aka Swift Shore) Park & maybe Tualatin River Open Space; most of the river through there is surrounded by McMansions, this being West Linn and all. To give you some numbers, the river drops about 32 feet over the 1.6 river miles from Fields Bridge Park to where it joins the Willamette, and another 10 feet from Fields Bridge to just below the low dam that diverts water into Oswego Lake.
To find a point where the Tualatin River is another 10 feet above there, you'll have to go somewhere a bit upstream from Rood Bridge Park in Hillsboro, another ~37 miles away as the river meanders. If you keep going upstream from there the river eventually bends upward again somewhere around Cherry Grove, south of Forest Grove, where it exits the Coast Range. Above that point there are at leastfourknownwaterfalls, all of them obscure due to limited access and hostile locals. Finding the uppermost one involves a bit of advanced wayfinding around the Coast Range's vast maze of current and abandoned logging roads. I've never attempted visiting any of them, and I usually love obscure stuff like this.
The term "lotic ecosystem" in that title means an environment with running water, as opposed to a "lentic ecosystem" where the water just sits there. A waterfall is obviously in the "lotic" category, and as with the linked Australian paper -- the Gorge has a few waterfall specialist bugs of its own.
In a post that was ostensibly about the highway bridge at Wahkeena Falls, I wandered off on a long tangent about Parasimulium crosskeyi, a species of primitive black fly that -- as far as anybody knows -- only exists along Wahkeena Creek and nowhere else in the universe. Per a 2016 Forest Service study, there's also the caddisfly Neothremma andersoni, and the stonefly Nanonemoura wahkeena, which again -- as far as anyone knows -- only exist in and around Wahkeena Creek, to the exclusion of all other equally nice creeks nearby. That study also looked at Farula constricta a slightly more cosmopolitan caddisfly known from a few creeks along the Oregon side of the Gorge, generally toward the west end between Mist Falls and Eagle Creek. F. constricta is described as "a small, moth-like insect, uniform dark brown in color, with a forewing length of 5 mm (0.2 in.) in both sexes". The doc further explains "Farula constricta is known from small, cold-water streams in the Columbia River Gorge. Populations of F. constricta appear to be extremely localized and limited to talus slopes, typically found at the base of small waterfalls." So Upper Multnomah Falls might actually be ideal habitat for these little dudes.
As often happens, when you run across a rare species with such a limited range, it often means there are other closely related species nearby, and at some point an entomologist decided some of them were a new species and not just an isolated population of the same species. In this case it seems there are eight eight other recognized species in the genus Farula in the family Uenoidae, and one of them -- Farula rainieri -- quite closely related. The doc at the the "eight species" link explains that you can only tell them apart by a close examination of the male genitalia, and goes on for a long paragraph on exactly what to look for, if you're into that sort of thing.
In the same vein, the 2016 USFS study also mentions some sightings of what it calls Neothremma near andersoni, a potential new species only seen (so far) at two sites along Multnomah Creek, where the Larch Mountain Trail crosses small side tributaries. Per a map in the doc, one site seems to be on a small creek near the Wahkeena trail junction & thus quite near Upper Multnomah Falls. So if you're doing the loop either way and a tiny unobtrusive caddisfly tries to hitch a ride to the next watershed over to go a-courtin', I'm not sure what advice to offer there.
On the other hand, N. wahkeena seems to have no close relatives and has the whole genus Nanonemura all to itself, per a 2001 paper, and only exists at a couple of water seeps along the trail near Wahkeena Spring.
If you think studying tiny caddisflies is a useless subject nobody outside academia could possibly be interested in, you would be quite wrong. For example, F. constricta is mentioned on a site devoted to flyfishing entomology. The idea behind flyfishing entomology is that the more you know about aquatic insects, the better you can imitate them and turn their natural predators into dinner, because circle of life, and all that. Someone in an OregonHikers thread mentions bumping into a couple of fly fishermen at the base of Wiesendanger Falls, one of whom caught a fish of some sort. The poster didn't mention what species the fishermen were pretending to be at the time, and possibly neglected to ask.
That made me wonder whether fishing is even legal at Wiesendanger Falls; I'm not entirely sure about this but I think the answer is a big no, you aren't supposed to drop a hook in the water anywhere upstream of the railroad bridge, according to a pile of fishing-related links I dredged up: [1][2][3] [4][5]. Now, Multnomah Creek does flow into Benson Lake, which the state actually stocks with various kinds of fisherman-friendly sport fish, some native, others not so much. So if any of them gets a notion to swim upstream as far as the base of Lower Multnomah Falls, that would probably be a bad place to be a baby caddisfly, and maybe an adult one.
As far as other Gorge endemic species go,
there's even a Larch Mountain salamander[doc], though its (still very limited) range extends beyond Larch Mountain. They even made it across the Columbia once, somehow, the northern ones forming a genetically isolated population [d
There's also such a thing as a waterfall specialist plant, like thisone discovered in Sierra Leone in 2017. I haven't seen any discussion about similar plants here, but it's entirely possibly nobody has looked for them yet.
It's a longstanding mediatrope and particularly a video game one, which has become one man's personal quest The problem in real life being that caves behind waterfalls tend to be a lot wider than the falls (see Ponytail Falls for example), and that's going to attract curious visitors, who will quickly find whatever gold you hid there since the cave never goes back very far. Or maybe those are just the decoy caves, and the real ones are hidden so well that nobody's ever noticed them. Someone on Reddit pointed out one example, a large cave system in Alabama that has an entrance behind a waterfall, though it has several other entrances.
One very weird thing-behind-a-waterfall (and an exception on the natural resource front) is at
Eternal Flame Falls, in a suburb of Buffalo, NY. Seems there's a methane seep in a small niche behind a waterfall, and the methane is concentrated enough that it can be set alight. Despite the name, the flame is not 100% eternal; visitors are encouraged to practice good citizenship by bringing a barbecue lighter along to relight the waterfall if it goes out.
