Upper Rock Creek Falls

For our next adventure, we're paying a visit to Skamania County's amazing Upper Rock Creek Falls, right on the outskirts of Stevenson, Washington. I am not exaggerating when I tell you this is one of the scenic highlights of the entire Gorge, and yet the big guidebooks and tourist info sites all seem to ignore it, local tourism folks included. I think the main reason for this is that up until quite recently the falls here were surrounded by private property and there was no way to even get a glimpse of them without trespassing. After the interwebs came along, word got out about the falls to a very limited degree, along with a set of highly sketchy instructions on how to get there. My IG post about the falls described the problems with this route:

Maybe 10-15 years ago the internet briefly discovered the place, via a route on the other side of the creek that involved sneaking through a cemetery, avoiding angry locals, and then scrambling down a steep landslide-prone 100' bluff, and then climbing back up, and being sneaky again, and hoping your car wasn't towed or torched in the meantime. It slowly dawned on people that no part of this route was in any way public property, at which point a lot of local outdoor-adjacent websites marked it as off-limits and removed any info on how to get there, and the place was effectively memory-holed.

We are not following those instructions today. It turns out that for the entire time this was going on, there was another route on the other side of the creek that was apparently known to locals and nobody else. This route was also private land up until quite recently, but apparently passing through was tolerated, maybe in exchange for not telling outsiders about the place, but that last bit is just me speculating. Then in 2022, Skamania County quietly bought close to 11 acres (in three tax lots ) near the falls so now it's public land the whole way to the falls. Those links go to the Skamania County Assessor pages for these properties, for any skeptics out there who think it's still private; you can go check for yourself and do not need to trust me about this.

So with that preamble, the correct way to visit the falls is as follows: Go to the intersection of Ryan-Allen Road and Aalvik Road, here. There's a wide bit of shoulder just west of the intersection, with room for maybe 3-4 cars, and you can park there. There's a red fire hydrant right at the intersection, and you'll see an unsigned but obvious gravel trail starting to the left of the hydrant. Take this trail. After a while you'll go thru a powerline corridor with another trail thru it. Going straight takes you to the Upper Falls, while heading off to the left takes you toward the Lower Falls, and I'll talk about the Lower Falls a bit later, although I didn't visit them on this trip and have no photos to share. Note that there are a couple of sections of stairs to watch out for, and right at the end there's a steep bank to scramble down. Just something to keep in mind, especially if you're on a bike, or you have small children or maybe over-excitable dogs in tow.

The one and only historical item I've found about the place is a June 1927 tourism ad by local Skamania County boosters with a photo of the falls, promoting the county as the Vacationists' Paradise, now easily accessible via the shiny new Bridge of the Gods. Full of trout streams, hiking trails, and hot springs resorts.

Oh, and back in 1896 there was also a brief gold rush on Rock Creek that was initially reported to be here (which is how I came to read about it), but turned out to be happening deep in the forest 20 miles upstream of here. So it wasn't an event at the falls, per se, but I only realized that after digging up a bunch of links about it (so to speak), and c'mon, gold rush stuff is always fun, so I kicked it down to the footnote area instead of just deleting it.

One bit of photo advice: The stretch of creek around the falls faces roughly east, so as the afternoon rolls on it's harder and harder to keep the sun out of the frame, and you might be better off visiting in the early morning. I'm not a big morning person, and if you aren't one either there are some decent hotel options in the area. The well-known local golf & destination wedding resort was not a great fit for us, but a lot of people seem to like it.

So you might have seen the "Upper" in the name and now you're wondering about the Lower Falls. The short answer is that it really depends on when you read this. Back in 2007 there was a huge, slow-moving, unstoppable landslide starting in February of that year. Here's a March 2007 Oregonian profile of an elderly neighbor whose house was slowly being torn apart by the slide.

Some striking AP wire photos from May 12th: Another homeowner had tried to move his house back away from the unstable slope, but didn't move it back quite far enough to avoid the massive slide damaging his house beyond repair. They ended up burning the house as practice for the local fire department, which is not that unusual in situations like this. The twist here is that the homeowner was a firefighter in the department, and participated in burning down his own house for work. There's a photo of him watching that could be the dictionary definition of "mixed emotions".

After things settled down a bit, word got out in the regional outdoor community that the lower falls were gone forever, destroyed by the massive landslide. But things erode quickly around here, and 2007 was almost two decades ago, and apparently they've more-or-less returned to a state resembling the pre-slide falls. I mean, I don't have before-and-after photos to compare, but current Google Maps imagery indicates there's a tall waterfall there again.

It turns out this is not even the first time this has happened. Here's a small December 1921 news item titled "Flood Destroys Falls", which actually undersells the scale of what happened. The lower falls were buried by debris and all infrastructure downstream was destroyed and washed away, including an entire hydroelectric plant, which was never rebuilt. A 1956 map of the area shows the dam site still owned by the local public utility district at that point, though they apparently sold it later. I'm not absolutely sure that the new owner turned around and built a house there, or that said house was one of the houses trashed by the next big slide, but it seems kind of probable, doesn't it? There are no really benign forms of geology happening on human timescales; anything that happens quickly is seen as a disaster, even if nobody dies. And then when geology so much as pauses for a few decades everyone forgets all about it, and it always comes as a huge shock when things inevitably start moving again, wash, rinse, repeat.

So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, from the look of things, I would not bet a penny that 2007 was the last-ever landslide here, which is why I said "it depends" about the Lower Falls. It's there now while I'm writing this, but could be buried in rocks and dirt and once again written off as lost forever by next spring, and could be completely back again by spring 2029. It's anybody's guess really.

So apparently the lower falls and the land between the two falls are also owned by the county, but the only area where you can take photos of it from below isn't public as of late 2024. And Zach Forsyth's waterfall book makes a really great point that photos looking down from the top of a waterfall are almost always a letdown. Often they're just a view of the parking lot, or looking down at a generic chunk of forest, and certainly not worth risking life and limb over. And that chunk of private land is also ground zero for the 2007 landslide, and seems to be zoned to prevent any future structures in that area, I think with the hope that the remaining landowners will eventually get a clue and sell at a price the county can afford. To that end, legend has it that county code enforcement will swoop in and taser you if you so much as snap two Lego bricks together while standing there.

While you're lying there getting tasered and sort of disassociating from the whole mess, you might wonder idly why it's county code enforcement that's tasering you and not someone from the city. To that end, here's a City of Stevenson "critical areas map" from 2018, showing overlapping areas of steep slopes, unstable soils, previous historical landslides, debris hazard areas downstream of known landslide areas, etc., I guess as sort of a guide when figuring out where not to build your dream home. The map also shows that, whether by pure coincidence or incredible foresight slash cynicism, the worst of the hazard area lies juuuust outside city limits, which jog south quite a bit here and just so happen to exclude most of Rock Creek. And as a result of this, the whole Rock Creek landslide situation is strictly a county problem that the city doesn't really have to care about, which is pretty convenient, I'll give them that at least.

---

So we've covered historical events for the upper and lower falls, but as for Rock Creek overall the most newsworthy happening came back in the summer of 1896 when the creek was the subject of a bona fide (but rather brief) gold rush. Seriously. Here's how it played out:

• July 30th:

  ONE MORE CRIPPLE CREEK FOUND
  
  Word has been received that there is considerable excitement at Stevenson, the county seat of Skamania County, opposite the upper cascades, on account of the discovery of gold-bearing quartz. In Rock Creek, about 15 miles back from the Columbia. Parties who were fishing on Rock Creek a few days since say Stevenson was practically deserted, all the men having gone up to the mines. Parties from East Portland discovered the vein, and have been exploring and developing it, and have already a considerable quantity of rock “on the dump”. When they have had a milling test made, they will be able to judge of the value of their discovery.

• August 2nd:

  There is no question about the richness of the quartz recently discovered on Rock Creek, near Stevenson, says the Dalles Times-Mountaineer. Thursday, Captain Waud was shown specimens of the ore that were streaked with gold, and that were said to assay from $3000 to $4000 to the ton. The captain says the excitement both at Stevenson and Cascade Locks over the new discovery is intense.

• August 5th, clarifies that the new mining district is 20-25 miles from town, near the origin of the creek near Lookout Mountain. Describes the area as "as inaccessible as could be desired by the most ardent sensationalist". The article continues:

  The ore seems to be rich in gold, silver and copper, and is easy to mine. There has been a number of claims staked out, and the country is full of prospectors, and strikes are reported daily. There are now four tunnels being driven and the ore is showing up better as they go. There is also some placer gold found near by, which is being worked with success. Many new miners are now at Stevenson getting outfits and preparing to go out — mostly from Portland. Pack horses can be obtained at Stevenson, which is the nearest town to the mines.

• August 6th: "Gold Is In Skamania", recaps the heady events of the past week and interviews one F. Woodworth, an experienced longtime prospector, who immediately bailed out of his boring railroad job and headed to the Rock Creek goldfields, immediately staking out some mining claims and grabbing a sample for the nearest assay office. His sample had just come back from the lab that morning, and was valued at a mere $4/ton, but he took that as a sign of success given how little time and effort he had invested so far. He was headed back to Stevenson after being interviewed, and averred that after his many years of searching, he had finally found the Mother Lode, the key to untold riches, for real this time, not like all the other times he thought the same thing and it didn't pan out, so to speak.
• Then on August 16th the worst possible thing happened to the gold country at Rock Creek: Not a mine cave-in, or a dynamite accident, or it turned out the whole thing was a big fraud, or there was a mass outbreak of weapons-grade syphillis, or any of the other kinds of confernal tarnation common to gold rushes. Instead, the news came of massive gold discoveries in the far north of Canada, in the area around Dawson City, Yukon. The Klondike Gold Rush was on -- a gold rush so famous they named an ice cream sandwich after it -- and just like that every gold-addled adventurer in America and across the globe, plus everyone else who made steady money off of prospectors, was off to the Arctic wastes in search of the Mother Lode. Which was definitely, absolutely, positively out there this time, if you just had the good luck or intuition to dig in the right place, and if you didn't find it on the first try, maybe the ten-thousandth try would turn out differently.
• July 1897, a year after the brief mania along Rock Creek, came "Mines of Skamania", an update on the current state of the local industry. It seems partly aimed at the many locals who had run off to Alaska a year earlier and had returned emptyhanded, noting that a fair number of people had found modest-to-moderate quantities of gold all over Skamania County at this point, and you might not get rich but at least a steady-ish income was available, potentially, if you knew what you were doing, and you probably won't freeze solid like poor Sam McGee, or suffer the various other calamities common to the poems of Robert W. Service, and you most likely won't share any of the grim fates of the humans in The Call of the Wild, and then be abandoned by your semi-loyal sled dog, who heads off to run with the wolves. You probably won't even have to turn to crime and then be brought to justice by Sergeant Preston and King the Wonder Dog, and it's equally unlikely you'll find yourself stuck in a lesser John Wayne movie with an earworm soundtrack.
  
  In short, the Skamania Gold Country just didn't offer the same exotic dangers as its northern competitor, so it may be just as well that the local gold rush ended before producing its own poet laureate. It just wouldn't be the same, somehow. Maybe some scary tales about catching hypothermia even though it's 51 degrees because it's a very humid cold; or maybe the sad tale of a lonely miner being ripped apart by an equally amorous but very clumsy sasquatch. I dunno, maybe there's some potential here in the right hands, but to do it now you'd first have to spend half an hour explaining the Rudely Interrupted Gold Rush that Really Happened Nearby, which kind of ruins the mood.
• And because some things never change, there's a semi-related coda from 1910. At this point it was time for a very different kind of land rush, with promoters insisting the former goldfields were perfect as orchard country. This was a common thing around the whole Northwest; there was this idea going around that fruit trees were a license to print money, which would pay for that gracious country estate you've always wanted, with virtually zero manual labor. So essentially the same dream that was sold to a lot of Boomers from the 1970s onward about starting their own wineries: Most of the work is simply sitting around in the golden sunset light and endlessly sampling the finished product, and maybe coming up with a genius-level new food pairing every now and then. Just as a general rule, if someone is trying to sell you any variant of farming that's somehow really easy and also profitable and also 100% legal, and they're trying to sell you on it instead of just doing it themselves, they're trying to pick your pocket.

Baker Creek Falls

Next up we're taking a peek at Baker Creek Falls, a small waterfall in rural Washington County, in the hilly area west of Sherwood. This is part of Metro's Baker Creek Canyon Natural Area, an obscure greeenspace area the agency purchased in 2011 or so. These late summer photos don't really do it justice; a Waymarking page for the falls has a photo of it when it was running at a much higher volume. I meant to go back on an early spring day and get better photos of it but getting there is a bit of a long drive to the far end of the metro area and then a few miles past there, almost into Yamhill County.

This a Metro Natural Area, as opposed to a Nature Park, so there are zero visitor facilities beyond the cute little Natural Area sign (if you can find it) and the agency does absolutely nothing to get the word out about it to potential visitors. Some Natural Areas like this may never get more development than they have now. Others will be upgraded to Nature Parks someday, but not during your lifetime or mine. The thing to understand here is that Metro takes a very long-term view of things, surprising for a government agency in this country. They prioritize buying land above building amenities, on the theory that nobody is making new undeveloped land; what's there now is as much as there will ever be, and it's not going to be any more affordable in the future than it is now.

The good news is that the falls are right next to a road and easy to get to, so you're not going to need much in the way of facilities. Have your favorite driving directions app guide you to the intersection of SW Kruger Rd. and Dutson Dr., which is right at a sorta-hairpin corner on Kruger. This is also where Baker Creek passes under the street. Just west of there, immediately past the bend, there's a flat stretch of shoulder on the westbound side of the road, on the inside of the turn, with enough space for maybe 2-3 regular-size vehicles, or quite a few bikes, or between 0.5 and 2 luxury SUVs. I mention that last bit because this area is a short distance from the vineyards of Yamhill County, and seems to be rapidly filling up with McMansions and hobby farms. So you can kind of sense the urgency of Metro's land-buying efforts here. On the positive side, on the way here you'll see lots of cute llamas and alpacas randomly hanging out watching the world go by, so you can look at them and just ignore the ghastly 6000 square foot Tuscan-Victorian chateaus and whatnot where their people live.

So assuming there's room to park, park there and look for a really obvious unofficial trail heading downhill to the creek. Follow it toward the creek, then look upstream for the waterfall. At this point you can decide for yourself whether it was worth the effort to get here, which is obviously going to depend on the season and how far you had to drive to get to this point. If you're just coming from Sherwood or maybe Tualatin, it probably counts as a cool local attraction, kind of like Cedar Hills Falls in Beaverton. If you're coming from downtown Portland, like I was, it's a lot of trouble to get to for how small it is. I thought it was still worth visiting, but I also recognize that doing things "for the sake of completeness" motivates me a lot more than it does most people, plus even if it had gone completely dry when I visited I'd still get a blog post out of it.

I don't have any news stories to share about the falls, or the creek, or the rest of the general area, but I did come up with a short list of Metro documents and press releases that refer to it, so here we go:

• 2009 press release about salmon returning to the area.
• A 2011 portfolio doc said public access is incompatible with water quality
• 2016-2018 Parks & Nature System Plan softens that policy a bit, and merely says public access is not a high priority because they're busy with water quality work.
• 2019-2022 plan refinement doc
• 2021 news items about restoration work
• News release about a 2022 expansion of Metro holdings in the area

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.

University Falls

Ok, next up we're back in the Oregon Coast Range again, and this time we're visiting University Falls, a 55' waterfall off Highway 6 in the Tillamook State Forest. Like the rest of the Coast Range (and unlike the Cascades) it doesn't have any high-altitude snowmelt feeding it over the dry summer months, and I happened to visit during the worst time of the year, at least in terms of the sheer volume of water going over it.

Unlike some of the Coast Range waterfalls we've visited before (like Fern Rock and the Bridge Creek duo), this one isn't right on the main road, so you have a couple of ways to get there. A 0.3 mile hike from a trailhead accessed by one-lane gravel logging roads, or an 8.5 mile loop mostly on old historic roads, with parking right off Highway 6. I picked the short hike because it was a mid-afternoon impulse to go check it out, days were getting shorter, and I try not to be out on the trails around sundown (or sunrise for that matter) in big cat country, or driving on unfamiliar logging roads after dark.

If you're more accustomed to visiting state parks and national forests, be aware that state forests are managed a bit... differently. By law their main purpose is still to produce trees for the timber industry, and the parts that aren't currently being logged are often designated for OHVs and motorized recreation in general, plus endless target shooting. That's actually the case here -- the Rogers Camp trailhead where the 8.5 mile loop starts also doubles as an ATV/OHV staging area, for one thing -- and a lot of hike-focused sites take a cautionary tone about this, warning readers that the vehicles are loud and fast, and the people are rough and rowdy and drunk and heavily armed and belligerent 24/7, and you might even see some of those icky red hats, you know the ones. I don't have any statistics about this, and this is just my anecdotal experience here, but in practice it was fine. There are separate trails for the motorized stuff vs. people on foot, and other trails for horses and for bikes, and the only times I saw any OHV people were on the drive in and back out, and -- at least while I was there -- people seemed to be sticking to that arrangement and were busy doing their own thing and not going out of their way to antagonize people in other adjacent fandoms. I'm not saying you should go and try to make friends if you hear banjos duelling in the distance. And my experience is, I'm sure, a function of people seeing a male Caucasian face and not immediately seeing a threat --or deciding to be one -- and the less you resemble that description, the more your mileage may vary. Though driving a foreign-made non-truck probably didn't do me any favors.

• First mention is an 1895 ad for the Wilson River and Tillamook Stage, listing University Falls as one of the scenic highlights of the 10 hour (!) journey from Forest Grove to Tillamook, a 52-mile trip that takes about an hour today. The ad lists a fare of $4, which is about $150 in 2025 dollars. Which is a lot of money for a one-way trip to Tillamook, if you ask me.
• 1968 mazamas hike
• 1983 interview with Elroy & Edmund Gravelle, twin brothers who had grown up in the area and were working to preserve a piece of the old Wilson River Wagon Road, the predecessor to today's Highway 6. Today there's a trail named after them.
• 1984 hike of the historic roads and trails, sponsored by the Washington County Historical Society.

Of these limited sources, nobody has bothered to explain which university they had in mind when naming the falls. I mean, sure, it's possible to enjoy the place without knowing which university they had in mind, but it's the kind of name that sounds like it might have an interesting story attached.

Tamanawas Falls

Next up we have some recent photos from Tamanawas Falls, a ~100 foot waterfall a short distance from OR 35, due east of Mt. Hood, right around where the drive time is the same if you take I-84 to OR35 South via Hood River, or US26 to OR35 North via Government Camp. The hike (OregonHikers | AllTrails) is a fairly easy (albeit rocky) 3.4 mile roundtrip, and the trailhead is right on OR35 (so there's no driving on any sketchy logging roads), and the falls at the end are spectacular, so it's quite a popular trail. At least for a place this far from Portland. If you prefer to hike in complete solitude, this trail is probably not the one for you, but if you like visiting with friendly dogs you'll probably have a good time.

One couple on the trail was hiking with around six dogs, at least half of which were Corgis. I was about to say something along the lines of "If they can do it, you can do it", to try to sound positive and encouraging for once, but realized it wasn't a fair comparison. A single Corgi might struggle on the trail, but put them in a group and they seem to reinforce each other, and all things are possible given enough Corgis cheering each other on. When they have to get up a steep bit of hill, they seem to tackle it one by one while the others beam positive energy at the one currently climbing, and everyone is really stoked once the whole mutual support group is past the latest obstacle. Which unfortunately means they're hopeless at anything that involves all of them working together in unison, like pulling a dogsled.

These photos were taken in fall 2024, and fall seems to be a great time to visit; the trail isn't all that high up -- the maximum elevation you'll encounter is only around 3500 feet -- so you most likely won't have to trudge through snow in September or October, but it's still high enough that autumn leaves start turning while there's still plenty of afternoon daylight available. And then on the way home you can stop for a bite to eat and wait out the blinding sunset light in your eyes on the way home. The internet largely disagrees with me, of course, and the consensus seems to be that you absolutely must go do the trail in the depths of winter, preferably by snowshoe, or dogsled, or probably by fixie snow unicycle (you probably haven't heard of it) just to be Xtreme™ and one-up everyone you know and then wonder why they never want to hang out. Which, as it turns out, is exactly why these people have so much free time to spend opining online about the one and only correct way to do various things.

I do want to add a couple of Useful Protips from this trip. First, if you're going here, or anywhere run by the Forest Service in the Northwest, and you want to know whether you need a Northwest Forest Pass to park there, their website is more authoritative on this point than the various enthusiast websites out there, no matter how good they are in other respects. In particular, the OregonHikers page for the trailhead said something about the pass only being required during prime tourist season, and it may still say that, and maybe that was true at some point. But these days Uncle Sam needs five of your dollars if want to park here, any time of the year. I get that some people ignore this, whether on principle or because they're just cheapskates. And I honestly don't know how strictly they actually enforce this -- it probably matters a lot how close you are to the nearest ranger station, for one thing -- and I also don't know what they typically do to violators -- whether it's just a federal parking ticket on your windshield, or they actually tow your car and leave you stranded out in the middle of nowhere. There have been a couple of times in the past where I decided to just chance it, and nothing bad ever happened when I did that, but I also enjoyed the hike less due to getting stressed out over it. So I pay up and then I can relax and just worry about car breakins. You might think that a big parking lot full of vehicles at $5 a pop (or $30 for the annual pass) ought to cover hiring a security guard to watch the lot, at least for summer weekends, but apparently that's not how it works.

Just to add to that, in 2025 the hot new trend in forest recreation management is to have a concessionare take over running a given site and opt out of honoring the $5 pass, or any pass other than the $30 annual one. They generally want $10 for a day pass for just that site, which really adds up if you want to visit one place in the morning and another after lunch. On the bright side, the $5 pass still exists, technically, and it still costs only $5; it's just that the number of places you can actually use one keeps dwindling. Tamanawas Falls parking was still $5 when I was there, but your mileage may vary, and if it does it probably won't vary in the downward direction.

Ok, second protip: If you rely on Google Maps for driving directions, be sure to ask for directions to Tamanawas Falls Trailhead, not Tamanawas Falls. This matters because Google interprets the latter to mean you want to drive to a point as close as possible to the waterfall itself, no matter what the road to that point is like, and getting there via the normal trailhead is not a priority. In this case Google has you leave Highway 35 a few miles south of here, and directs you onto Forest Service road NF-3520-620, a steep, narrow gravel logging road that climbs around 500' vertical feet up onto Bluegrass Ridge, ending at a point that, yes, is pretty close to the falls as the crow flies, definitely closer than the official trailhead will get you. On the other hand, the crow can soar gracefully over multi-hundred foot cliffs and you can't, or at least you can't more than once. And before you even get to that point, the main problem is that the road is also marked Unmaintained & Closed To Vehicle Traffic, so there's almost certainly a locked Forest Service gate in the way. If you can get past that somehow, legally or otherwise, there will most likely be fallen trees across the road, so bring a chainsaw. (Note that the legal way involves passing a civil service exam and joining the Forest Service, starting out at Junior Assistant Outhouse Inspector, and slowly working your way up the federal seniority ladder until the Forest Service starts trusting you with keys to things, which could take a while.) And long story short, this might be the closest road to Tamanawas Falls, but it's not likely to be the fastest. My photoset includes a couple of photos of the trailhead and parking lot, and if you park somewhere that doesn't look like that, you are in the wrong place.

Geology

Our story starts around 29,000 years ago, the last time (or one of the last times) that an eruption of Mount Hood included actual lava flowing down and away from the mountain. Cascade eruptions in recorded history, and in native oral history before that, only talk about explosive-type eruptions like that of Mt. St. Helens in 1980, but Cascade volcanoes are often surrounded by old lava flows, reminding us they can erupt other ways if they want to. (To any volcanoes reading this: Your kind and generous offer to arrange a demonstration is truly appreciated, but is not strictly necessary at this time. Thanks!)

So the lava erupted from a vent on the east side of Mt. Hood, and flowed east and downhill until it came up against Bluegrass Ridge. This is the north-south ridge that runs for several miles on the east side of Mt. Hood, completely not aligned with Mt. Hood for the simple reason that it's older (I've seen numbers putting it at ~3m years old versus no greater than 1.3m for Mt. Hood) It's also a few hundred feet too tall for anything flowing down from Mt. Hood to just flow over the top, so the other options are to flow around the obstacle if possible, or stop and pile up if not. Water finds a way back to the sea. Lava dreams of that, but flows a bit and piles up a bit and eventually solidifies in place. Some of the lava flowed north, parallel to Bluegrass Ridge, until it could flow around the ridge and continue downhill from there, and finally froze in place at some point, well short of the Pacific Ocean. The regular climate resumed after that event, and water from the mountain still needed a way around the ridge, which led to present-day Cold Spring Creek. This is not necessarily the same exact channel as the lava earlier, or any water channel that might have been here before the lava came, but same basic idea. And then the (usually) slow magic of water plus time took over, and the creek has been eroding its way downward and backwards, and Tamanawas Falls is the slowly moving point where that ongoing process is at right now.

(But don't just take my word for it. Here's a 1997 USGS report, Geologic History of Mount Hood Volcano, Oregon. A Field-Trip Guidebook, which was created for a 1996 geology conference in Portland as a fun driving tour if you're in town for an extra day or two. Pages 22-23 cover the area along OR 35 near the falls.)

History

Depending on who you believe and what the current best evidence says, it's an outside possibility there may have been people here when all that happened. Though current conventional wisdom holds that people have been here for around half that time, with the caveat that ice age floods would have buried or erased a lot of evidence. That's still around 15000 years, which is long enough that it's safe to assume the whole region was thoroughly scouted for useful waterfalls, meaning the ones that migrating fish have a decent chance of leaping over. Tamanawas Falls is clearly too tall for that; the only traditional fishing site I know of in the Hood River watershed is at Punchbowl Falls over on the West Fork of the river.

Beyond that, I have no idea whether this was a significant place for anyone before recorded history. A 1977 Forest Service planning doc for the agency's Mt. Hood Planning Unit (which seems to coincide with the whole Mt. Hood National Forest) tried to inventory all "cultural resources" in the area, and came up with precisely nothing before the pioneer era. And the only maybe-pioneer-era thing they had for Tamanawas Falls was an item for "Initialed Trees", of some unknown age. It does not say exactly where the Initialed Trees were, or even what the initials were, and there aren't any signs along the trail pointing out where one might find said Initialed Trees. Which is fine; quite honestly I don't suppose there's any way to showcase historical graffiti without some percentage of visitors thinking they have permission to add to the collection. If you need a protip about that: First I have to tell you not to carve your initials in trees, because it's bad for the trees. But if you absolutely positively must carve something in a tree, be sure to include today's date and time, and some sort of unique ID (Legal name and address, Instagram or TikTok or YouTube @name, Social Security number, or whatever). Just some sort of ID that future historians of the year 2225 can cross-reference in the archives and pull up your vital records and complete browser history, including the supposedly incognito parts, so a sign next to the tree can include an accurate biography of you. But hey, that's immortality for ya: You can maybe influence whether people of the future have heard of you, but you can't control what they think of you.

I should point out that the Forest Service did not actually consult local tribes for that 1977 study, because 1977. Which is how you get things like a 2008 incident where an ODOT road crew damaged a sacred site named Ana Kwna Nchi Nchi Patat after not realizing what it was. The site happened to be right next to US 26 and was impacted when they added a turn lane to the road. The Forest Service finally agreed to restore the site in 2023.

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that the odds are extremely low that the very first person to see the falls was a white guy with a camera. The reason I say that is that sometime between 1895 and 1909, photographer Benjamin A. Gifford (1859–1936) took this photo of the falls, eventually publishing it in his 1909 photo book Art Work of the State of Oregon, currently on Amazon for a mere $895.00. He isn't credited with discovering the falls -- he must have already had an inkling that the falls existed before bushwhacking up Cold Spring Creek lugging a heavy large-format camera. But it also wasn't a well-known destination back then, since it apparently didn't have a name when he took the photo and it ended up being called "Giffords Falls" for a while in the early part of the 20th Century. This burst of fresh attention did not, however, result in a trail to the falls right away, and it spent much of the 20th Century as a known and named but rarely visited mystery spot deep in the forest.

The only use of the old name I've come across in local newspaper archives is an Oregon Journal article from September 1907. The article itself is fairly dry, concerning various recent and proposed improvements in Oregon canals and railroads, including the never-completed railroad loop around Mt. Hood. The article is illustrated with a variety of photos from around the state with some vague connection to the text, including one that's definitely the falls here, labeled "Gifford Falls, Base of Mt. Hood". I think they used it on the idea that the creek flows into the E. Fork of Hood River, which powers the hydro plant at Dee, OR, which powers the city of Hood River and may power the proposed railroad someday, plus the falls themselves might be a scenic destination for tourists on the proposed railroad someday. I don't see any photo credits listed for the image, so for all we know the newspaper's one and only depiction of "Gifford Falls" might be illustrated with someone else's photo.

And with that, the falls fell off the radar again until the 1960s. Sometime along this time period it picked up the name "Tamanawas", but I don't know when. Official maps of the Mt. Hood National Forest (updated every few years) showed nothing here thru the 1952 edition, while the 1963 map shows the falls, but no trail or trailhead, and it's labeled using "Tamanawaus", the old spelling. You might have been able to get a look at the falls from above at this point, as the Elk Meadows trail now passed by the general vicinity of the falls and connected to a forest road labeled "S230", which would have to be present day NF-3510-620. (not a typo: the NF-3520-620 I mentioned runs just south of here, and it looks like it was road S229 under the old numbering scheme in effect back then).

If you google the place now, you'll encounter an internet factoid claiming that the name was changed from "Giffords" to "Tamanawas" in 1971, but that's not quite what really happened; I found an Oregon Journal article about the renaming (and a few others), dated December 4th, 1971, and it briefly explains what actually happened. Listed among various decisions by the state geographic names board, the article says "Spelling of Tamanawaus Falls on Clear Creek in the Hood River drainage was changed to Tamanawas to make it phonetically in keeping with the Indian language." So the immediately previous name was basically the current one but spelled wrong.

I was kind of hoping that the old spelling would lead me to more vintage news articles, but no such luck. The only other use of that spelling in local papers was a mistaken use of the old spelling in a 1982 article, over a decade after the experts officially fixed it.

The 1972 map has the falls under the current name, spelled correctly this time, and it now shows the trail too. The trail isn't numbered, though, so it might have been new, or that corner of the map was just too cluttered to add a trail number. I thought that narrowed it down to a six year window for roughly when the trail came about, but then I found a 1964 USGS map showing the falls and trail and labeling it "Tamanawaus", and that's the oldest 1:25000 map of the area available on the USGS site. While lower resolution maps as late as 1978 don't mention it.

The trail appears in Don and Roberta Lowe's 70 Hiking Trails: Northern Oregon Cascades (1974), but it wasn't mentioned in local newspapers until 1978, in an Oregonian article on fun fall activities around Mt. Hood. It also got a mention a Roberta Lowe column in a November 1978 Oregon Journal column full of factoids about trail history. She tells us most of the trail was built by volunteers, but Forest Service experts were called in to blast a way through the big boulder field toward the end, since the agency generally doesn't let volunteers go around dynamiting stuff on federal land. You might think that would go without saying, but it was the 1970s, and you could get away with a lot in those days if you told people that you had done this before and looked like you knew what you were doing. So this "no amateur demolition work" rule might have been a new policy at the time. And she doesn't actually say when this trail construction had happened. It sounds recent, but the rest of article hops around between the first trails on Mt. Hood going in around 1908, and recent work to reopen the Mt. Defiance trail by building a path from Starvation Creek to the old trail -- which used to start at the little state park at Lindsey Creek, now bypassed by I-84. Anyway, mentions of the place seemed to pick up a bit after 1978, and it started appearing in Mazamas hike announcements afterward.

Which is not to say the area wasn't getting the usual Forest Service treatment. On aerial photos it's not hard to see the patchwork pattern that comes from decades of Forest Service timber sales. I couldn't find anything in the newspapers about timber sales near the newly minted trail, so I checked HistoricAerials, which has 1981 and 1994 imagery for the area. The 1981 photo just shows unbroken forest to the south of the falls and trail, while the 1994 edition has a patchwork of clearcuts centered on forest road 3520-620. Until quite recently the forest near the falls was threatened by the proposed Polallie-Cooper timber sale project just north of here, which the Forest Service has been trying to push through since the mid-2000s.

Speaking of clearcuts, I was a bit surprised to realize how little protection the area around the falls actually has. The creek has been proposed as a future "Wild and Scenic" waterway but doesn't currently have that status, though it flows into the East Fork of Hood River, which does. The falls are also juuust outside the Mt. Hood Wilderness boundary, as the area was proposed but excluded during Congressional horse trading in 2009. Instead the falls are part of the ~13,000 acre "Mt. Hood Additions Roadless Area". "Roadless Area" indicates -- as you might expect -- a lower level of protection than "Wilderness" does. Frankly it's more of a description than a protection measure. It doesn't actually ban logging or other development within the designated area. It doesn't even ban roads; a Forest Service explainer gamely argues that "roadless" means "less roads", not "no roads" or even "no new roads". That isn't what "roadless" usually means to the general public, though, and so they're forever putting out new proposals to clearcut a roadless area and always seem shocked and bewildered every time they're sued over it. In a similar vein, the falls are also included in the 82,385.47 acre "Mount Hood Park Division", as designated by the US Secretary of Agriculture way back on April 28th, 1926. (A 16,762.97 acre "Columbia Gorge Park Division" to the north of here was created around the same time.) The "Park Division" designation suggests it's managed for nature and recreation along the lines of a national park but run by the forest service, and a lot of contemporary news accounts from that period act like that was the case. But again, "Park Division" was more of a description than a protected area, and it seems as though the Forest Service eventually allowed these designations to fall by the wayside.

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Footnote(s)

[1] The more that I look at the map, that road might be useful as part of a loop hike: After visiting the falls, take the Tamanawas Tie trail #650B up to the Elk Meadows Trail #645, follow that to where it intersects the Bluegrass Ridge Trail #647, and after a short distance bushwhack over to road 3520-620. Go downhill/south on the road, and cut over to the East Fork Trail #650 at the point where the trail and road run together for a bit, and take the #650 north back to the trailhead. There's also a point where the road and trail pass about 100' feet from each other, as the crow flies, and maybe that would work as a connector and maybe it wouldn't, I haven't actually tried this yet and don't know what it's like in the real world. But the interwebs version looks kind of interesting. Maybe I just have a bias in favor of reusing old forest roads; it's mostly that there are a truly mind-boggling number of them out there in the forest, and the Forest Service is never going to have enough money to either decommission old roads properly, or to build and maintain any more trails beyond what currently exists, so if an old road goes somewhere interesting, the pragmatic thing would be to not turn up our noses at using it. Also old forest roads are wider than the average trail, which miiight help avoid being swarmed by ticks during the height of tick season.

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[2] 1995 Preliminary Geologic Map of the Mount Hood 30- By 60-Minute Quadrangle, Northern Cascade Range, Oregon has a date of around 1.8 million years, from a location on the west side of Bluegrass Ridge, if I understand their latitude-longitude format correctly. The PDF describes the contents of the map but doesn't include the map, which I haven't located yet.

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[3] As for the rest of the article: It was titled "'Cleanup' of Names Protested By Board" Which is and isn't what readers of the distant year 2025 might think. The State Board on Geographic Names was upset. "Outrageous, this cleansing program of the federal agencies", said the director of the Oregon Historical Society. "A colorful part of the West could be lost if this continues", said a board member. But they weren't talking about place names containing racial slurs, or names honoring Confederate generals, or notorious soldiers from the Indian Wars, or anything like that. No, it seems that a few years earlier the Bureau of Land Management had looked at their map of Steens Mountain, in a remote part of SE Oregon, and saw the name "Whorehouse Meadow" and got a case of the vapors. It seems the name dates back to the Old West, named for the only business that has ever existed there or for miles around in any direction, and then only seasonally, and -- according to historians who study these things -- it was more of a gussied-up stagecoach than an actual house. The agency quietly changed it to "Naughty Girl Meadow", a name that invites at least as much curiosity as the original. That finally caught the notice of the state board in 1971, though I gather the original name wasn't officially restored until the early 80s.

In related news, the board concluded the name "Hells Canyon" was not offensive and should be the official name, rather than "Grand Canyon of the Snake". Also, "Moloch Beach" on the coast became "Moolach" since it was intended to be a Chinook word for "elk", not anything biblical, but someone had spelled it wrong somewhere along the way and it got stuck that way for a while. The name has since been further corrected to "Moolack", I guess to be even less Moloch-y. And in another bit of typo repair, "Bagsby Hot Springs" was officially changed to the correct "Bagby".

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[4] In a situation familiar to photographers across the ages, Gifford sued the Ford Motor Company in 1916 for using one of his photos in a company publication without permission or credit. He won the case and was awarded $250 (which is about $7200 in 2024 dollars) plus attorney fees.

Gifford (but not the falls) was mentioned in 1972 article of oldtimer reminiscences. It seems the Giffords owned a raspberry patch near Salmon Creek in the 1920s, near (and now in) Vancouver, WA, where the author and her husband first met while picking berries at age 11.

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[5] Two papers came back after checking JSTOR a few different ways:

Printzen, Christian, and Tor Tønsberg. “The Lichen Genus Biatora in Northwestern North America.” The Bryologist, vol. 102, no. 4, 1999, pp. 692–713. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3244256. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.

German and Norwegian lichen taxonomists visit the Pacific Northwest to study an inconspicuous lichen genus, announce four new species. A passage describes what they're studying and why this is good place to do it:

"the genus comprises crustose lichens with green algal photobionts, biatorine apothecia, colorless, simple to 3-septate ascospores, and bacilliform pycnospores. Biatora is widely distributed in the Northern Hemisphere, but the extra-European taxa have not received any systematic treatment. The diversity is obviously highest in temperate and boreal coniferous forest."

And you're hearing about this now because a specimen of Biatora nobilis, one of the newly-described species, was collected from a conifer tree somehere along the Tamanawas Falls trail. The type specimen was collected up on Vancouver Island, so this isn't a situation like one of those weird insects that only lives around the base of a few Gorge waterfalls and nowhere else. Common but inconspicuous, and tough to tell different species apart, and there are not a lot of taxonomists out there period much less ones specializing in lichens, and there are big swaths of the biological world where nobody has gone through and done the detailed taxonomy work. Lichens are a weird specialty because a lichen is a symbiosis between a fungus species and an algae species. I actually knew that part already, but I didn't think about how that complicates putting them in categories. At present they're classified by (and named the same as) the base fungus species in the pairing, but this is an ongoing controversy. You can get lichens that seem completely unrelated by swapping out the alga species, yet they're all counted as the same because the fungus is the same. I dunno, you may not find that very interesting. But it's a thing I just learned today and I wanted to tell you about it.

Secondly, a specimen of the stonefly Taenionema kincaidi that was collected further up Cold Spring Creek was examined in:

Stanger, Jean A., and Richard W. Baumann. “A Revision of the Stonefly Genus Taenionema (Plecoptera: Taeniopterygidae).” Transactions of the American Entomological Society (1890-), vol. 119, no. 3, 1993, pp. 171–229. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25078571. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.

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[6] Vintage USFS maps of the Mt. Hood area from 1921, 1936, 1939, and 1946, 1952 and 1966 don't show the falls, or the trail to the falls, or the trailhead. They generally do show the Bluegrass Ridge and Elk Meadow trails, and a lot of the campgrounds in the area existed that far back, just not anything here.

Likewise, a vintage brochure "Forest Trails and Highways of the Mount Hood Region" (1920) covers a lot of the scenic highlights of the region, including the Gorge, and doesn't say a word about Tamanawas Falls. A 1939 brochure "Trails on Slopes of Mount Hood" comes with a detailed map and doesn't show the waterfall here, while including a variety of others, all smaller than Tamanawas, and a 1961 reissue of the same guide shows even more trails but not one to the base of the falls. A state highway department publication, "Oregon scenic highway drive: Mt. Hood Loop" has an exhaustive log of sights to be found along the route and doesn't mention the falls, and it's dated 1981 (though it looks like a reprint of a much older guide.)