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.

Dog Creek Falls

Next up we're visiting Dog Creek Falls, on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge. It's a little turnout off SR14, east of the famous Dog Mountain. I was in the area looking for something else, and saw a sign labeled "Dog Creek Falls". That name didn't ring a bell to me so I figured I should at least stop and have a look. A very short trail leads to the base of what is, frankly, a fairly average waterfall, and no marked trails -- or any unmarked-but-obvious ones -- continue on from there. So I took a few photos and continued on my merry way.

It turns out that the part you can easily see from the base doesn't even scratch the surface of what's up there, including at least one more waterfall, about 70' high. But I gather the trip is difficult and highly technical and generally involves starting at the top and descending with ropes and lots of expensive spiky bits, and (long story short) that's why I have exactly zero photos of what's up there, and a short list of links and whatnot.

• A short video of Dog Creek above the falls
• old Canyoneering Northwest page (via the Wayback Machine)
• RopeWiki pages about the upper and lower segments of the creek
• Zach Forsyth's Waterfalls of the Columbia Gorge (2018) relates a story of local law enforcement busting an illegal weed grow somewhere high up in the Dog Creek watershed back in August 2007, and then realizing they'd bitten off more than they could handle when it was time to go home. They ended up spending the night up there and were rescued the next day by local search and rescue teams.
• The one and only historical news item I have for Dog Creek Falls comes from July 1987: The Forest Service had recently bought the land around the falls from the Trust for Public Land and wanted public input on what to do with the place.
• Has been the subject of OregonHikers forum threads now and then. Four from 2009 (which in retrospect was the heyday of the site), and one each from 2010, 2011, and 2018 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Panther Creek Falls

Our next adventure takes us to the absurdly photogenic Panther Creek Falls, a bit north of the Columbia River Gorge in Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest. This is a bit further afield than most of the weekend hikes I post here, so a few notes are in order: It's about a 90 minute drive from Portland, first heading east to the town of Carson, WA, and then north on Wind River Highway (or Wind River Road; signs are a bit inconsistent on this point). The map above has all the route info you need, and I would just add a couple of details:

• First, the directions have you turn right off Wind River Something-or-other onto Old State Road. This is a loop road that intersects the highway twice, and the directions assume you take the second turnoff. If you leave the highway and the intersection isn't a right angle, you jumped the gun and are on the first of the two junctions. Just stay on the road till you're back at the highway, do a U turn, and you're back on track. I think the road you turn left onto is initially called "Panther Creek Road" and doesn't become forest road NF-65 until the national forest boundary.
• Second, the parking lot for the falls could really use an official sign to that effect. But right now there isn't one, so your best bet is to look for what looks like an old rock quarry on the right side of the road, forming a rough parking lot. There's only one of these along the road, unless maybe you're on completely the wrong road, so it's a good clue that you've arrived. Most likely there will be a few Subarus parked there already when you arrive. I was strictly looking for official USFS signage and kept going for a few extra miles before turning around, but that's just me.

As far as I can tell, as of 'press time' you don't need a Northwest Forest Pass to legally park here, though that could change at any time. This is the regional National Forest parking permit, which runs $30/year, or you can rely on $5 one-day passes you can print at home if you don't like planning ahead and don't mind paying the inkjet cartels every so often. I had a day pass with me due to an earlier stop the same day, so (required or not) I left it on the dash just in case, as a sort of talisman to ward off prowling tow trucks.

I think there is supposed to be a sign for Trail #137, right across the road from the quarry/parking lot. When I stopped by there was just a bare pole on the left side of the road, but there was only one of those, and the trail starts just to the right of that pole. The trail switchbacks downhill a short distance to a junction: A sign there says "viewpoint" is to your right, and to your left is another trail branch to the base of the falls. The viewpoint is not at the actual top of the falls, but at the point partway up where Big Huckleberry Creek rumbles in and joins the main falls. That's the heavily-flowing bit in the first photo. If I was going to be a tedious pedant about it, I would pause here and go off for a few paragraphs arguing that it's actually a separate waterfall and then try to think of a name for it, since the side creek already has lower, middle, and upper falls of its own. The more important thing for you to notice is all the wooden railings keeping you on the trail, and the multilingual forest of warning signs, and the makeshift memorial right behind you as you watch the falls from the viewpoint, all of which are due to a tragic fall back in 2018.

Backtracking up to the trail junction, the other branch of the trail heads downstream a little and then switchbacks down to another viewpoint. This is where the first photo was taken, and you can see the whole falls you had a partial view of at the top. But wait, there's more: This lower viewpoint is also the top of another, lower tier of the falls, which adds another 30' or so to the total height of the falls. Right now there's no legal way down to the bottom of this bottom tier, and I have no idea how one might get down there safely, or back up. Strictly from a picture-taking standpoint the ideal thing would be a bridge at the same level as the inter-tier viewpoint, but downstream a bit so photos can include the whole falls, and make it a proper solid bridge, not a bouncy one, so long-exposure shots aren't ruined by other people walking across. But the Forest Service will probably never have that kind of money, and I'm pretty sure I can live with the current arrangement if I have to.

This is one of those places that the internet made famous, and this humble little blog is far from the only place you can read about it. It has the inevitable Washington Trails Association, Friends of the Gorge, and OregonHikers pages. And, unusually, its own Wikipedia entry, which features a photo seemingly taken from a point that's now off limits after the big post-2018 trail redesign. Other pages about the falls include ones at Adventures PNW, Aspiring Wild, Outdoor Project page, and World of Waterfalls. And despite all the stereotypes about social media, I have not actually encountered any Instagram photos of anyone doing yoga poses in front of the falls, unless maybe you count this one from early 2018. And it might also be of someone doing Gangnam Style dance moves instead, and either way they're far away and in rain gear, so I don't think it counts.

You might think a 140' waterfall that looks like this would've been famous since pioneer days, or at least from Carson's heyday as a hot springs resort town in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I mean, just look at it, c'mon. But that doesn't seem to have ever been the case. I fired up the local library's database of the local newspaper, which runs back to sometime in the 1850s, and there is precisely one mention of the falls in all that time, and it's a story about the accident in 2018.

So looking at other pre-internet (or at least pre-WWW) print media, the falls got high marks in both Plumb's Waterfalls of the Pacific Northwest and Bloom & Cohen's Romance of Waterfalls, two early guidebooks on the subject, both from the early 1980s. But many potential visitors would have read the parts about following bad roads off into the middle of nowhere, where -- if you could even find the trailhead -- you then faced a steep scramble downhill through the brush to a sketchy, dangerous viewpoint, while lugging a heavy camera and tripod around, and hoping a few of your 36 film photos turned out ok, or fewer than that if you were shooting 120 or 4x5 film.

The only other pre-internet mention of the place I've come across (though surely not the only one that exists anywhere) is a 1990 Forest Service publication, specifically some appendices to the master plan for the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Page E-5 explains that despite the falls, Panther Creek as a whole just isn't "outstandingly remarkable" enough to qualify as a federal Wild & Scenic River.

It turns out that this isn't the only waterfall named Panther Creek Falls; an oddly similar one exists in the mountains of northern Georgia, and is also owned & operated by the US Forest Service. In fact it's only a few miles from Tallulah Gorge, which I visited and took a few photos of back in the late 90s. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution article from September 2023 (a few days ago) offers the heartwarming tale about an elderly golden retriever that got heat exhaustion along the long trail to the falls, and all the strangers who pitched in to help along the way to get the dog back to the trailhead safely. The dog is fine now, btw, but has officially retired from further hiking adventures.

I went back to the newspaper database and tried a few other search terms, just in case that led to anything interesting. The falls have evidently never gone by "Panther Falls", since the only use of that phrase came in a 1931 headline, when a woman and her daughter homesteading near Coquille were startled awake by a cougar either falling or jumping onto the roof of their cabin. (Slow news day, I imagine.)

In the same vein, there are Panther Creek high schools in both Cary, NC and Frisco, TX, and whenever one of their sports teams loses there is often a headline containing the words "Panther Creek falls", like this example from 2022.

And finally, I tried just "Panther Creek", and found a few results for that at least:

• Most were about a different creek by the same name near McMinnville, namesake of a prominent Yamhill County winery and a bunch of area real estate listings.
• The correct creek was mentioned briefly in a 1981 Roberta Lowe article in the Oregon Journal, but just in the driving directions on the way to an even more remote trailhead, the start of a long, technical hike up in the Indian Heaven area. Lowe columns were often like this, because the Journal felt its readers were grown-ups and trusted them to judge for themselves if they were up for that level of adventure. The paper went out of business the next year for unrelated reasons, and we never had to witness how this policy fared during the heyday of personal injury lawsuits.
• A March 1937 first-person account, relating what sounds a bit like a 1930s version of Cheryl Strayed's Wild: Miss Jacqueline Arte (age 24) becomes fed up with the noise, chaos, commotion, hypocrisy, artificiality, and general wrongness of modern life, turns her back on society, and sets off to hike the Cascade Crest Trail (a predecessor of the Pacific Crest Trail), packing a change of clothes, a book of Nietzsche, and a .38 pistol. (Ok, not just those three items, but it sounds more 1930s, more hardboiled when put that way.) She started off at Panther Creek -- which served as the boundary between the modern world and the great wilderness -- and headed for Mt. Rainier, by way of endless meanderings and side trips. In Part II, she decided to hole up in a remote cabin and spend the winter writing a book. But ended up blowing out a knee dealing with firewood, and eventually had to be rescued after running low on food. Though she initially refused to leave until she was done writing.
• This wasn't Arte's first wilderness adventure; in October 1934, the Oregonian noted her arrival at Crater Lake, having set out on a unhurried trip down the Skyline Trail (Oregon's predecessor to the PCT) the previous April, this time with the aid of a wayward pack horse named "Red Wing". The article said she was done hiking, but Crater Lake is of course nowhere near the California border, and she continued on her way south and eventually wrote a first-person account for the paper once she decided she was actually done for real, in January 1936. Fifteen additional months seems an exceptionally long time to hike from Crater Lake to California, but she explained she'd run low on money and supplies at one point and took a job as a ranch hand for a while, after panning for gold didn't, er, pan out.

I really wish I knew what became of Miss Arte after the 1937 episode; she doesn't appear in the Oregonian again after that, or in any other newspaper covered by the library's newspaper database, for that matter. I also don't see any references to books published under her name, though using a pen name would explain that. Maybe she decided society wasn't so bad after all, and settled down and had a quiet ordinary life after this; or maybe she hit the wilderness again and went completely off the grid this time, and vanished once and for all, the end; maybe she just moved out of town or across the country or changed her name and news of her further adventures never made it back to little old Portland. In short, the trail has gone cold. So on the remote off-chance anybody out there happens to know the rest of her story, please feel free to drop a note in the comments down below. Thanks!

Dougan Creek Falls

Next up we've got a few photos of Dougan Creek Falls, a small waterfall a short walk from Dougan Falls, which we just visited in the previous post. Dougan Falls is on the Washougal River, about an hour's drive NE from Portland; Dougan Creek flows into the river just downstream of there; and Dougan Creek Falls is on the creek a short distance upstream from that confluence, if that makes sense. Or you could just go to the other post and look at the embedded map there. I mentioned this waterfall briefly in the Dougan Falls post, saying it's not worth driving an hour to see on its own merits, but if you're visiting the main falls anyway you might as well go have a look. So here we are, visiting it in a separate post, because I decided that was a rule here at one point a long time ago. Was I really that worried about running out of material? I don't remember why anymore, but changing the rule now would lead to things being inconsistent, which would bug me.

Only some of these photos are of the actual falls. Others are of the fast-flowing stretch of creek between there and the Washougal River, which is pretty photogenic too, with a few drops almost as tall as the 'real' waterfall. Though some of those are over very large logs, and waterfall pedants are in furious agreement that water flowing over a log doesnt count as a real waterfall no matter how big the log is. There's also a stretch where the creek slides over some bare rock at a low angle, and I gather there's a debate about what the minimum angle the drop has to be before it counts. And what all this really boils down to is that I wasn't sure what Dougan Creek Falls was supposed to look like going into this, so I took lots of photos of the whitewater parts just in case any of them turned out to be the thing I was there to see.

I was going to work in an analogy about this being the "B side" attraction, or the B movie on a double bill, before remembering that very few people under 50, or 40 tops, have any idea what those things even are. A more recent analogy might be, well, just about everything on basic cable for the last couple of decades. But I'm not sure anyone under 40 watches a lot of basic cable these days and likely never did. Ok, so in modern video game terms this is a side quest that pads out your total play time by a bit (so it feels more like you got your money's worth) but doesn't contribute to the main thrust of the game. I think that gets roughly the same idea across. Though I was never much of a gamer, to be honest.

Dougan Falls

Next up we've got some photos from Dougan Falls on the Washougal River, around 6 miles upstream (and up the road) from Salmon Falls, which we just visited in a recent post. This one is supposedly just 19 feet high, or 30 feet if you count a couple of smaller drops just downstream of it, but it's around a hundred feet wide, so it looks really impressive. I added the supposedly because it looks taller than that to me, but I'm also really bad at guessing heights of things, so I'm probably wrong here. It just feels like it ought to be taller than that, I dunno.

The pleasant fall day when I took these photos just happened to be Halloween, and Dougan Falls seemed to be a stop on someone's scavenger hunt for the occasion. I didn't ask anyone to explain since they all seemed to be in a big hurry, but I gather the goal of this stop was to take a group photo of your team having a picnic at the falls, optionally in costume. Every so often a car would pull up, people would spill out, lay out a blanket or set up a card table, take a few photos, pack everything back up, and head back the way they came. One group in formalwear had time for a cigarette break and a glass of bubbly or maybe cider, but overall I got the sense there may have been a few too many stops on the day's itinerary. Hopefully there was a fun party afterward that made it all worthwhile.

Unlike Salmon Falls, where your presence is distinctly unwelcome, here there's a whole day-use area with picnic tables, room for parking, and official access to the river. The area around the falls belongs to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, specifically their Yacolt Burn State Forest, which we last visited while checking out waterfalls along the Lewis River (further north of here) back in 2011. As the name suggests, this whole area ended up as state-owned land after the half-million acre Yacolt Burn back in 1902. A forest service map of the area (mostly covering their Gifford Pinchot National Forest) mentions that the adjacent campground and picnic area are operated by Skamania County rather than the state. Chapter 8.60 of their county code declares the area between Dougan Falls and the fish hatchery downstream a "Recreation Safety Corridor", and the rest of the chapter lists all the things you aren't allowed to do within said Safety Corridor: No drinkin', no shootin', no fireworks, no unauthorized camping or campfires, and a catch-all prohibition of "any activity including stopping or standing from one hour after sunset to one hour before sunrise (day use only)". Which is probably just official-ese for making the day-use areas day-use only, but the phrasing is kind of weird, like maybe the "stopping or standing" bit was added to close a loophole after someone with a good lawyer weaseled out of a ticket.

The reason for all these rules (as well as the campground and other facilities) is that the falls are a popular local swimming hole, and have been for as long as anyone remembers. And although the location feels pretty remote, it's still close enough to Portland to attract city people too. It made the Portland Mercury's 2014 list of summer swimmin' holes, which is a thing they put together for a big summer issue every few years. A 2013 Willamette Week article also mentions it & the rest of the river briefly, as a summer water activity for the whole family. (Most of the article concerns windsurfing in Hood River, so you'll have to scroll down a bit.) It also has largely positive Yelp reviews. A Youtube search on "Dougan Falls" and "diving" returns the usual stuff you'd expect, but also several clips of some people scuba diving below the main falls, as the river forms a surprisingly deep pool there. There are no coral reefs to explore here, and no need to ward off sharks or Bond henchmen with a speargun, but if you just want to go hang out with some trout (or chill with the salmon, in season), this is apparently a great place to do that.

Obviously there's more to do here than swim. There's waterfall hunting, obviously, which is how I first heard of this place. There's not much of anywhere to hike to from here, but I did come across one OregonHikers thread about it, I suppose because the "hiker" and "waterfall photo fan" Venn diagram overlaps by a lot. A short stroll across the day-use area does get you to nearby Dougan Creek Falls, a smaller and less impressive waterfall on the eponymous creek, a Washougal River tributary. That waterfall is not really worth visiting on its own merits, but it's so close by that you might as well pop over for a look if you're in the area anyway. But that's a separate blog post, which you'll see here as soon as I'm done with it, whenever that turns out to be.

If swimming around below the falls and leaping from the top seem too tame, you can always go over the falls in a boat. A page at American Whitewater describes the segment of the river ending at Dougan Falls, starting several miles upstream, which goes over enough waterfalls on the way down that it's come to be known as "the Waterfall Run". An Oregon Kayaking page describes the various challenges in more detail, if you're curious, or you could just watch these two videos of kayakers doing the Waterfall Run, and one of some rafters having a moderately bad day at Dougan Falls.

I was there well outside of peak outdoor fun season and didn't see anyone running the falls that day, and (other than scavenger hunters) most of the other people I saw were on motorcycles. It turns out this is a popular thing. I think I mentioned in the Salmon Falls post that the drive along Washougal River Road is ridiculously scenic. Motorcycle Roads Northwest recommends it as one of the best roads in Clark County, and a forum thread on another site has people going on about how much fun it is. Both mention turning around here, because the roads past Dougan Falls are all gravel. Motorcycles are not a subject I know anything at all about, but the sheer volume of tutorials and forum threads and such about how to ride on gravel tell me it's an acquired advanced skill, along the lines of driving a car on snow. For drivers of the four-wheeled persuasion, the Skamania County Chamber of Commerce recommends the road as a scenic drive, though their directions have you arrive at Dougan Falls the back way, via one of those gravel roads, and then turn off at Salmon Falls Road and head down to SR-14. Which skips a lot of the best scenery, but at least the route doesn't leave Skamania County at any point, which is the main thing, of course.

Dougan Falls also gets a quick mention in the 2015 book Gold Panning the Pacific Northwest, as the downstream end of the stretch of river where it's worth looking. The books says the very best spot along the Washougal River is much further upstream, at the mouth of -- wait for it -- Prospector Creek. Because early pioneers around here were so unimaginative that they literally gave away the spot where the gold was just because they couldn't think of anything else to call it. The book refers the reader to a 1977 Washington Dept. of Natural Resources circular, St. Helens and Washougal Mining Districts of the Southern Cascades of Washington for more info, and notes that the abandoned gold mines around the area are notoriously hard to find and usually concealed by vegetation. Which led me to a website called Mindat (as in "mined at", I think), and its map of said Washougal Mining District, and a page with photos of the district's long-abandoned "Last Chance Mine". Which I am not going anywhere near, because of a rather memorable safety lecture we got back in Cub Scouts about not going anywhere near abandoned mines. Which, unrelatedly, was right around the same time my parents decided that gold panning might be a fun outdoor activity for the whole family. It wasn't, unfortunately, as it involves a lot of uncomfortable squatting in the hot sun, swirling a pan of sand or mud around, finding nothing, and repeating this for hours on end. Or at least it seemed like hours on end; it may have been more like 20 minutes, exactly once, though the still-almost-brand-new gold pans sort of lingered around the house for years afterward. If I remember right, someone finally bought them when we had a garage sale years later, probably thinking they'd just stumbled across a new fun activity for their whole family.

If your personal hobbies lean more toward complaining about things on the internet, which -- let's be honest -- is true for quite a lot of people, you're also in luck. You might have noticed a few houses right at the falls, and more along the road just before you get there. Turns out there's a whole subdivision lurking in the forest just downstream of the falls, behind the houses you can see from the road. I'm not sure what the total population nearby is since it doesn't seem to count as an unincorporated community or even a census-designated place, but it does qualify as an official Nextdoor 'neighborhood'. So all you need to do is buy a house here so you can join that corner of Nextdoor, and then you can complain to your heart's content about kids these days, tourists, outsiders, newcomers, Californians, the government (federal, state, and county), and all of the other usual suspects. At least I assume that's what the Nextdoor group is for, going by what I've heard about all other Nextdoor groups. I don't imagine there's a lot of other breaking news happening around the greater Dougan Falls metro area, at any rate.

Downstream of the subdivision is the Kiwanis Club's Camp Wa-Ri-Ki, which until 1973 was the Washougal Honor Camp, a minimum-security work camp belonging to the state prison system. Inmates were kept busy fighting forest fires, planting trees, building logging roads, and so forth. The library's newspaper database has a few news items about the place, which may hint at why it closed after just over a decade in operation. It opened in August 1960, and had its first of many escapes a couple of weeks later. This was followed by escapes in 1961, 1965 (this time robbing a motel before being recaptured), 1966, 1967, June and July 1969 (possibly leading to awkward conversations years later, when asked what they were doing during the moon landing), and 1970. Things quieted down after the change in ownership and most mentions of the camp afterward were in connection with an annual craft fair. And that's about all the news there was about Dougan Falls and vicinity (at least in Portland newspapers) up until 2017 when it figured in a lurid Portland homicide case. It seems the killer dumped the body at the falls instead of a genuinely remote location because going any further would have involved driving on gravel, and that led rather directly to his getting caught. Legal wants me to put a disclaimer here to the effect that this is not meant as helpful advice on being better at crime, and should not be construed as such, as this is not that kind of website. And with that I'm going to do an abrupt & awkward transition to a different topic, because a.) I didn't want to end the post on a down note, and b.) avoiding that fairly recent news as if it didn't happen doesn't sit quite right either. So, switching gears in 3... 2... 1...

Um, anyway, one thing I've always liked to do here on this humble blog is link to other people's pages about the same place or thing I'm writing about. At first it was just to share other perspectives or images that I thought were interesting, which occasionally resulted in them linking back to me, incidentally boosting both of our search engine ranks in the process. But that doesn't really work anymore, plus now there's an important principle at stake. In 2022 it feels like a real achievement -- when writing a post like this -- to wade through a few dozen pages of search results, picking out the few that were created by actual human beings and aren't auto-generated junk created by an algorithm at some sketchy content farm. For some search categories it's already too late; search on the name of a street, any street, and you'll have to wade through real estate listings for every possible address on that street and others in the surrounding area, from several competing spammers, before you'll see a single result about anything else. Doesn't matter if a given property hasn't been on the market since before the internet existed; the top search result for it has already been claimed and is defended zealously. A few years ago the hot thing was to take the (freely available) US Board on Geographic Names database and do things like generate a "hunting and fishing report" page for every named body of water in the country, naturally including heavily polluted rivers in industrial Southside Chicago. Oh, and one for Dougan Falls even though the whole river upstream of Salmon Falls is a strict no-fishing zone. There are real estate listings, Yelp results, and more claiming to be for Bayocean, Oregon, even though the entire town fell into the ocean way back in the mid-20th century.

The auto-generated junk isn't always as obvious as the ones above, either; for a Dougan Falls example, let me point you at a couple of pages at Rare.us and Narcity. Both are kind of clickbaity and are padded out by embedding other people's photos a la Buzzfeed. If I had to guess, my guess would be that the first was written by a live human and the second, unbylined one is by an AI, but I can't quite put my finger on why I think so, and I could easily be wrong on both counts. So yeah, realistically I don't actually think linking from one site way down on the tenth page of search results to another on the fifth or twentieth page is going to turn back the tide of garbage, but it still feels like it's worth doing. It's sort of a John Henry vs Skynet thing, if I can mix metaphors a bit.

Long story short, here's what I've got this time around:

• little bay root, a portland-area online retailer
• at least two pages at Activerain. It's some sort of local real estate site, and blog posts there tend to emphasize how amazing the area is.
• 1FUNGRL Travels
• SwittersB & Exploring, about salmon DNA
• The Forgetful Wanderer
• Perceptive Pot Clueless Kettle
• Curious Gorge page

Cape Horn Loop

Next up in the ongoing Columbia Gorge series (part of the larger "Places You Can't Go Right Now Because Pandemic" series), we're doing the loop trail at Cape Horn, on the Washington side of the river directly across from the Shepperds Dell / Bridal Veil area. If you've looked north from there, or from the viewpoint at the Vista House, you might have noticed a stretch along the Washington shoreline where sheer 200' cliffs and a waterfall drop straight into the river, and higher bluffs rise up behind them. That's the spot we're visiting now.

The links above describe the loop in detail so I won't duplicate all of that here. The short version is that you switchback up to the high bluffs and walk along the top for a while, with several dramatic viewpoints along the way. This amazing stretch almost became a gated subdivision for awful rich people back in the 80s, before an array of nonprofits and philanthropists stepped in and bought most of it. This part of the trail eventually dumps you out on a rural back road that looks like farm country anywhere in the Northwest, with no clues to what's right next door. You continue down a gravel road and then through a former farm as you start descending toward the river. This turns into switchbacks down through another stretch of forest with more scenic overlooks, including one directly over the west portal of the half-mile rail tunnel under Cape Horn. So I imagine that would be a fairly unique place to set up and do some trainspotting if that's your thing.

The trail doesn't get you all the way down to the river, because of the aforementioned sheer cliffs. So you continue right along the cliff edge for a while and end up at Cape Horn Falls. What looks like the base of a waterfall is merely the base of the middle of three tiers; the creek continues on down to the lower tier where it drops into the river, but there's nowhere to get a good look at that part along the trail, and I don't think there's any reasonable way to see that part up close without a boat. Where "reasonable" means "something I might consider doing". I say that because, like Palisade Falls, Cape Horn is a popular ice climbing spot when conditions are right, and I ran across a forum thread indicating that you can also get there by walking down some rich person's long private driveway to where it crosses the railroad, and then walking on the railroad tracks until you get to the icy cliff you're going to climb for fun. At least there's a narrow beach along the river at the base of the cliff, when the river level isn't too high, so you wouldn't automatically end up in a fast, icy river if you took a tumble, I guess.

Anyway, the falls are where this photoset ends, because I forgot to put my phone back in airplane mode at one point earlier in the hike and it happily drained itself to near-zero trying to find a cell tower. The rest of the trail is more hiking through the forest, and then ending up on another road, which doubles as the last 1.2 miles of the trail, taking you back to the parking lot. You might think that you could park at this lower trailhead and do a short hike over to the falls, but parking there is absolutely verboten and I gather very bad things will happen to you and your car if you do. So park in the official lot up the road, or take the bus, since the lot doubles as a park & ride for the Skamania County bus system. Which connects to C-Tran at Fishers Landing, so it's possible to do this without a car, if you can work around the limited bus schedule.

Like a lot of recent posts here, these photos are from a couple of years ago, which was actually the first time I'd visited the Cape Horn area. I was about to explain it away because the trail system has only been open to the public since 2004, so I couldn't have gone when I was a kid, or during an early-90s period of "Hey, I have a working car and my weekends are weekdays, explore all the things!" Then I remembered that 2004 actually was a long time ago, and this humble blog has existed since late 2005, and I just sort of didn't get around to it until the Eagle Creek Fire, when many places on the Oregon side of the Gorge either became less appealing or were (and still are) closed entirely. I think one reason I don't pay as much attention to stuff on the Washington side of the Gorge is that I don't like driving on SR14. Not because of the road itself, but because of the other drivers. On this particular trip, I was tailgated by a large pickup truck for the last couple of miles before the turnoff to the trailhead. I was already going a bit over the speed limit anyway but that wasn't enough for him, & he was close enough that I could see him angrily pounding his steering wheel and yelling, before having to grip the wheel again with both hands for yet another hairpin corner. Honked angrily when I braked for the turn and turned off. And sure enough, that truck had a huge Tr*mp bumper sticker on the back. As that was a couple of years ago, I imagine he's either in jail or a federal judge by now.

One sorta-interesting detail just occurred to me -- the name "Cape Horn" of course refers to its more famous namesake at the far southern tip of South America, which it sort of resembles if you squint just right. And apparently the name was in use as early as the 1840s, predating both the Panama Canal and any of the transcontinental rail lines that ended in Portland. So it's entirely possible that it was named by someone who had seen the original on their way here. Although let me add -- and any longtime Gentle Reader(s) out there may have heard me say this before -- that if there's a record of what it was called before pioneers showed up, I would happily support renaming it back, along with anything else named after faraway places or people with no ties to the region (e.g. Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens).

Coyote Wall & the Labyrinth

Nearly everything is closed right now due to the global pandemic, and I'm holed up at home trying to make myself do things besides working and reading the endless bad news. So I'm going to try to put a dent in my endless pile of draft blog posts and unused photosets with some of this unstructured free time; it's obviously not a replacement for going outside, but it's the best available option at the moment.

So here's a photoset from last May, taken at Coyote Wall in the Columbia Gorge, on the Washington side a few miles east of White Salmon and Hood River. Coyote Wall is easily visible from Hood River & Interstate 84; it's the huge rock formation that looks kind of like a flat-topped desert mesa with sheer cliffs, but tilted maybe 20 degrees so that one end meets the river. I only recently realized the place had a name, which was around the same time I learned it has an extensive trail system that I knew nothing about. Turns out that officially there have only been trails here since 2011, when the Forest Service adopted a master plan for the area. Of course there were trails here before that, largely of the outlaw mountain bike variety, but apparently I wasn't part of the right rumor mills or whisper networks or insider cabals or whatever to have known anything about the place. Story of my life, really.

Anyway, if you go at the right time of year -- which I apparently did -- at some point while hiking endlessly uphill you'll hit the altitude where it's currently peak wildflower season. Which is truly amazing. I like to think some of the photos in the photoset approach doing it justice. To give you some idea, my original plan for the day was to do the Coyote Wall - Labyrinth Loop trail, but in reverse order to ensure I at least saw the Coyote Wall part if I decided to bail out early. Then after that I was going to cross the river and go to Rowena Plateau, a place I've repeatedly said is my favorite place in the Gorge and maybe my favorite anywhere, a strongly-held opinion dating back to 1990 or so, mumble-mumble decades ago. And I decided to punt on that whole leg of the trip and wander around here longer instead. Mostly I just wanted to stay longer here, but I had a gut feeling that doing both in the same day would lead to ranking them, and the old sentimental favorite might not win that one, and overall I'd be happier leaving them as separate and unique experiences. I am slightly embarrassed to report this, but while I was wandering around with all the sunshine and flowers there miiiight have been a brief "Sound of Music"-style twirl or two. I say "slightly" because there was no actual singing involved, just the twirl part. And furthermore, I am only telling you any of this because there's a global pandemic now, and everything's closed indefinitely, and I really miss going outside in any capacity. So yeah.

Eventually the trail brings you to a point where the steep slope levels off and the open grassy slope gives way to a mixed forest, and a few trails lead off in different directions. A lot of people turn around at this point, having gotten what they came for, and I probably would have been just fine doing that myself in retrospect, but the loop I was doing kept going, so I kept going, and the next bit was something called the "Crybaby Trail". My memory can be a little sketchy about these things, but my recollection is that this trail is slightly wider than a mountain bike tire, and it's laid out along the very edge of a cliff many hundreds of feet high, and on sunny days it attracts all of the world's snakes to come and sun themselves. Or to hide in bushes right next to the trail, for some of the more easily startled snakes. I may be exaggerating about the width of the trail, possibly. I may have mentioned once or twice that I have an occasional heights issue, or more exactly a not-having-anything-to-grab-onto-around-heights issue. Which I don't like, and I try to poke at it under controlled conditions when I can, in the hope I can get over it or at least mitigate it at some point. This hasn't worked so far, and I have to say the Crybaby Trail was my least favorite part of the adventure, but maybe next time will do the trick, whenever that turns out to be.

The Labyrinth part of the loop takes you through varied terrain to the east of Coyote Wall. Some additional open grassy areas, and sections of forest, and lots of rugged lava rocks, and at least one waterfall. I would probably have more to say about this part if a.) I hadn't just been where I'd just been (both the Julie Andrews part and the cliffside Well of Souls part), and b.) I had written this post in a reasonably timely fashion, when it was easier to remember more than a few key highlights. One key highlight I do remember from this stretch of trail was briefly glimpsing a pika, as it fled thinking I was some sort of horrible predator. I hear them all the time while hiking but I'm not sure I'd ever actually seen one before this one. So that was cool. The cute little squeak sound they make sounds exactly like a family dog's favorite rubber squeak toy when I was a kid. So when I hear pika calls I think I'll always have this mental image of a small dachshund eagerly playing fetch with a large squeaky rubber cheeseburger. Which was exactly as silly as it sounds.

In any case, it's time to wrap this thing up before the clock hits midnight, so I can keep the "at least one post per month since 2005" streak going for another 30 days. I had this idea at the beginning of April that I might have time to do more than one this month given all the working from home and avoiding all human contact and so forth. But it hasn't really worked out that way so far. I'm not sure whether that's because April 1st was just a few hours ago and there simply wasn't time, or because it was two billion years ago and I spent most of the month trying to evolve cell walls, followed by a rudimentary central nervous system. Both of these things seem equally true somehow. But I have high hopes for May. Got a shiny new vaguely-defined time period to work with, that's bound to make me incredibly productive and creative this time around. Please note how I am setting this joke up for future me as I try to finish another post with minutes to spare the evening of May 31st.