Nesika Falls

Next up we're having a look at Nesika Falls, another very tall but little-known Columbia Gorge waterfall right in the middle of the main tourist corridor, a just a little over a mile east of Multnomah Falls and even closer than that to the Oneonta trailhead. If you're heading east on the old Columbia River Highway, you might notice a small parking lot with some sheer cliffs and mossy boulders behind it, and absolutely no signage of any kind to tell you why there's a parking lot here. Its most common use seems to be as a turn-around spot for tourists trying to score one of those $20 VIP parking spaces at Multnomah Falls Lodge, which may involve a slow crawl thru the tiny lodge parking lot followed by flooring it down the road (or continuing a slow crawl down the road, depending on traffic) to the closest turnaround (i.e. here) and back (i.e. here), and coming back for yet another slow crawl thru the completely full lot. A useful rule of thumb here is that if you find yourself using any driving techniques you learned during holiday shopping, you should accept that you are not currently having fun, will not begin having fun anytime soon, even if a parking spot opens up, and should probably rethink your plans for the day.

The second most common use of this lot is as unofficial (but free) overflow parking for Multnomah Falls. People who park here to use this spot as Multnomah Falls overflow parking tend to just trudge along the road, ignoring all the "No Pedestrian Access" signs along the way, including the ones on the narrow East Viaduct, and trying to duck in time every time an RV with extra-wide side mirrors rolls through. I tried that route once way back in the early 90s (as described here) and absolutely do not recommend it. What you want to do instead is look for trails heading up into the forest, and take the westbound one. There are no signs to tell you this, but this spot is an access point for Gorge Trail No. 400, the still-incomplete trail that might connect Troutdale to Hood River someday. The eastbound trail is easier to find, right at the east end of the parking lot, but it's not the trail you want right now. To find the westbound trail, cross the little road bridge or culvert immediately west of the lot, and look for a trail a few steps beyond there. When you cross the bridge, look down at the little creek it crosses. This is the same stream that forms the falls we're here to look at, so if it's just a trickle or it's dry entirely there's nothing to do but come back another day in a wetter season.

Assuming the creek's flowing, follow the trail uphill a short distance, maybe 50'-100', look uphill, and try to work out the route of that little creek as it comes downhill. If the creek's flowing but you don't see the falls, try going a bit further, or go back a bit, and look for gaps in the trees and underbrush, and keep trying until you see something resembling the photoset above.

Once you see it, look back toward the parking lot and note the large rock formation that completely blocks the view of the falls from the highway. If that wasn't there the waterfall would probably be a bit less obscure than it currently is.

After you've seen the falls from a distance and taken a few photos, continuing westbound on the 400 will take you to Multnomah Falls, specifically to the first switchback past the bridge. So you can either continue uphill to the top and skip most of the crowds, or you can head downhill, elbow your way thru the crowds, and hit the snack bar for a plate of genuine Multnomah Falls nachos, or whatever. Before choosing your adventure, look behind you at the junction. A vintage plaque, low to the ground, announces this is the "Ak-Wanee Trail", though nobody really uses that name anymore. This trail officially opened in 1978, and the name honors a young Yakima tribal member who worked on trail construction here and died in a car accident shortly before the trail opened to the public.

The trail figured in several Roberta Lowe newspaper columns over the next few years, primarily in the Oregon Journal:

• A 1979 Journal column explaining exactly how to find the unofficial and very, very steep Elevator Shaft trail.
• A 1980 Journal column explaining that the new trail had not been properly manicured yet, and was still a bit rough.

• 1984 Oregonian column (after the Journal went under), on hiking the 400 from Multnomah Falls through to the obscure Exit 35 Trailhead east of Ainsworth State Park. (That point marked the end of the trail until the short-lived Warrendale-Dodson segment opened a few years later, and it became the end of the trail again in 1996 after a big chunk of trail was erased by massive landslides a bit east of that trailhead.) The column mentions a dead-end bit of abandoned trail uphill from the present-day trail, built as an abortive attempt to route the trail closer to Nesika and Waespe Falls (another seasonal waterfall we'll visit as soon as I finish that post). They would certainly be less obscure if that had worked out, but we're told that the necessary blasting could have posed a hazard to cars and trains below so they dumped that idea.

  The abortive spur trail seems to still exist, according to the state LIDAR map, with the trail junction located right about here. Though so far I have completely failed to find this trail at ground level. That's one limitation of LIDAR maps, especially in this part of the world: You can make out exactly what the ground is shaped like, but when you go to visit in person that ground may be under an impassable layer of brush, fallen limbs, poison oak, devils club, rusty nails, broken glass, old barbed wire, etc., and there's really no way to be sure until you get there. Another limitation is that LIDAR really just tells you that a potential creekbed intersects a cliff at a given spot and obviously can't tell you if there's any water in the creekbed.

• Also nearby, unofficially, or maybe closer to Waespe Falls next door, is the lower end of the Fire Escape trail, which is marked at the upper end by an ominous sign that reads "Fire Trail - Emergency Only". Peope often confuse it with the very similar Elevator Shaft trail which is a mile or so to the west, closer to Multnomah Falls. Even the OregonHikers Field Guide page about the Elevator Shaft manages to confuse the two. The key thing to know is the Elevator Shaft is supposed to be uphill only, while the Fire Escape is said to be down only, and for the life of me I have no idea why. I suppose it reduces the odds of people having to pass each other on these precarious routes, if nothing else. I have never done either one, but my understanding is that the main difference between the two is that the Elevator Shaft has an actual trail carved into it, with over 100 tight switchbacks, and you can see it on LIDAR and even Google Maps' satellite view, while the Fire Escape is just a talus slope that's known to be descendable in a pinch.

One unsolved mystery I have: If the bridge and maybe the parking lot date back to around 1916, and the trail only arrived in 1978, what was here before that? Was it really just a turnaround spot for heading back to Multnomah Falls all that time? I have no idea.

The name is fairly recent; it's just named after the Trails Club lodge near the creek, way up above the falls. It sort of fits with the existing pattern of real or invented Indian names bestowed on various places by non-Indians, mostly in the early 20th century. Which is not really ideal, but the lodge is about the only named landmark anywhere nearby, so I guess it'll do in a pinch. The other idea that's been proposed is some variation on "Farula Falls" or "Caddisfly Falls", as it's one of a handful of Gorge waterfalls that are home to Farula constricta^[1], one of several rare caddisfly and stonefly species endemic to the Gorge. It's not a terrible name, but the thought of using it makes me sort of anxious, like I can't shake the idea that it'll attract the wrong kind of attention, from the sort of people who would happily wipe out the last survivors of an endangered species just to own the libs.

To summarize uses of either name across the interwebs: We've got two old OregonHikers forum threads in January and May 2011, followed by a 2013 thread about a then-new trails layer in Google Earth. IIRC one of those threads mentions what might be the abandoned spur trail, referring to it as a "convenient game trail". The name also appears on someone's WentHiking page and another photo linked from there. And that's about it, really.

If I'm not mistaken, under the right weather conditions this area becomes a celebrated ice climbing spot known as "New World Amphitheater", as discussed in two threads at Cascade Climbers, and featured in the Gorge ice climbing chapter of Northwest Oregon Rock. Translating their maps and names into non-climber, I thiiiink Nesika Falls freezes into "Black Dagger", while "Brave New World" is either a different route up the falls or it goes up one of several ephemeral streams immediately to the east, I'm not totally sure which. And "Blackjack" corresponds to a creek west of Nesika but I'm not 100% sure which one. I don't think I've seen any of these theoretically rather tall waterfalls actually flowing, so this is kind of a moot point, and it's why I generally don't bother with ephemeral waterfalls in this project: The only reliable way to see them would involve visiting while a major storm is in progress, which in turn means spending lots of time getting drenched and being cold and wet and miserable, which I can't recommend.

As I understand it, to be a great Gorge ice climbing spot, a place needs a couple of things: A fairly low-flow waterfall (ones that dry up in the summer are great for this) so it'll freeze all the way and not be a firehose in the face of anyone climbing it, and it should be one that runs down the face of a cliff instead of projecting outward like a lot of the major ones do, so it'll freeze on the cliff and not just make a big ice stalagmite at the base. This is not the case everywhere, btw; Helmcken Falls in British Columbia is supposed to be the world's ultimate ice climbing spot, and it's on a major river and forms a giant ice cone over the winter. But around here, if those conditions are met, then it's the taller the better. Speaking of which, I haven't seen any numbers on exactly how tall Nesika Falls is, so let's have a look at the state LIDAR map and see if we can work that out ourselves. I usually do this by trying to pick points above and below that clearly aren't part of the falls but as close to it as I can get, and subtract the altitude of one from the other. This tends to give numbers on the high side of the range but hopefully not by much.

First off -- starting at the old highway and proceeding uphill -- LIDAR says there's a small lower falls below the main one, maybe 15'-20' tall and hidden sort of behind the big rock formation here. (top; bottom). I haven't actually seen this one; it must be hidden in the dense brush back there, and you may need a machete to get a better look at it.

Then we have the main falls, which I think is what's shown in all of my photos. Given a top point at ~815', and a bottom one at 395', that gives us a 420' main waterfall. Seriously.

Then we have a number of smaller upper falls that are set back a bit from the main one and I suspect aren't visible from below. These miiight be visitable from above with a bit of bushwhacking, but I haven't tried this myself and this is not a legally binding warranty. Also, most of these drops are fairly short, and short drops on a small creek may not be very impressive in person, and your photos of them may not necessarily bring fame and fortune, just so we're clear on that. With those disclaimers out of the way, here's what LIDAR says is up there:

1. Upper falls #1 (100') (top, bottom)
2. Upper falls #2 (~30') (top, bottom)
3. Upper falls #3 (~20') (top, bottom)
4. Cascades(~50') (top, bottom)
5. Upper falls #4 (~25') (top, bottom)
6. Upper falls #5 (~20'?) top, bottom
7. And another 20' one on a small tributary east of the main creek (top, bottom)

Just west of there, the one on the next sorta-obvious stream to the west (top, bottom) might be the "Blackjack" of the ice climbing world. It seems to drop a whopping ~550', which would be pretty impressive if there was any water at all going over it most of the year. But then, the lack of water means it erodes slower and stays taller longer, so whatever.

Before we wrap this up, let me point out a few other points of interest nearby, two of which are completely gone now, and another that never made it past the proposal stage but is kind of interesting anyway:

• One of these points of interest was right by the parking lot until quite recently. The creek passes under the highway on an original 1914 bridge, or maybe it's just a culvert, and either way it's pretty small and boring. Around 1979, a local Eagle Scout decided this just wouldn't do and did some amateur masonry here as his Eagle Scout community service project, adding an ornamental bridge railing to the existing bridge. Thus reminding people why we don't usually task Eagle Scouts with civil engineering projects. Recreating the HCRH calls it the "Eagle Scout Bridge", and has a photo or two of it in its post-1979 state. There's even a photo of it in the Library of Congress archives. The National Register of Historic Places nomination for the highway labeled it a "non-contributing structure" and had a few brief and opinionated words to say about it:

  Historically, there has been a structure at this crossing of an unnamed creek since the CRH's construction. The present masonry parapet walls on this small span date from the early 1980s, and represent an unsuccessful attempt to "restore" this bridge in the highway's style.

  I started calling it the Monkey Jesus Bridge: In both cases a well-meaning member of the public decides to improve a thing that doesn't need improving, and... doesn't. It's said that for many years afterward, if you hung around nearby at dusk on the right evening, sometimes the ghosts of ancient Roman engineers would appear and poke at it with sticks and make cutting remarks in Latin about the crooked arches and the barbarian tribes that must have built them. It helps to remember that these guys have been guzzling wine from the same ghostly lead flagons for the last 2000 years and have become a bit irritable over the years. But that's all a moot point, because it's gone now. At one point during the pandemic there was an extended closure of the highway due to a combination of winter landslides and trying to clean them up in a full social distancing environment, and ODOT took advantage of that long closure to quietly make the 70s bridge railing vanish without a trace. There was no public outcry; in fact almost nobody noticed it was gone. And the esteemed Romans have switched to haunting the McMansions of Mt. Scott. Imagine something like Poltergeist, but the ghosts are just unreasonably angry about classical orders and the Golden Ratio, and barbarian tribes who don't even know how to build a villa properly.

• There was also an Oneonta train station or platform somewhere right around here in the early 20th century. A 1927 Metsker map has an all-caps "ONEONTA" label right around the turnout location, while the inset bit of map shows the locations of the "McGowan's Cannery", "Columbia Beach", and "Warren's Cannery" train stops, all in the Warrendale-Dodson area east of here. I haven't come across any historic photos of any of these stations, and most likely they were cheap and rustic, just enough platform so people could get on and off the train with a little dignity. The original road survey map for this stretch of the HCRH, aka County Road 754, covers the Multnomah Falls thru Oneonta Gorge area on page 2 of the PDF, and it definitely shows a train station named "Oneonta" that's separate from and some distance west of the "Oneonta Falls" label. It seems awfully strange to me that any train stop would be anywhere except right in front of Oneonta Gorge, or as close to there as is practical. There was never a town here, or farmland, or or any other reason to come here besides the famous wade-to-the-waterfall spot. Even the Oneonta Trail (which accesses the additional falls upstream of the gorge) wasn't built until the 1930s. Also note that although the tracks seem to be right next to the highway here, and it kind of looks like you could drop someone off or pick them up for their train commute into the big city, the space in beween the two is a roughly 100' cliff, and the highway engineers of 1916 neglected to put in a grand staircase to connect them.

• The mystery not-a-trailhead also appears to be the exact spot where the Columbia River Highway would have intersected the never-built eastern half of County Road 625 (map pdf; ordinance pdf), since it was supposed to intersect the highway near the old train platform. This proposed road dates back to the 1890s, and the unbuilt part was a truly absurd idea. The western, built segment of road ran roughly parallel to -- and uphill of -- the Palmer Mill Road that Gorge fans may be more familiar with, which is actually a former railroad grade. The parallel country road might still exist as part of the maze of unmarked trails, tracks, and goat paths up in the Palmer Mill - Angels Rest area. The built segment ended around the location of the long-gone Palmer sawmill and its vanished mill town, and it won't surprise anyone to learn that the Bridal Veil Lumber company was the primary force behind the proposal.

  From the Palmer area, the unbuilt segment would have made its way sort of northeast, descending into Multnomah Basin, albeit by a somewhat different route than the Multnomah Basin Road that was eventually built. Which brings us to the absurd part: From there, starting just east of the top of Multnomah Falls, the road would have dropped toward river level, or at least railroad level, by a series of tight, precipitous switchbacks immediately east of the unofficial Elevator Shaft trail. If you're ever tried that trail or even looked at it up close, it is very difficult to imagine how a usable road could ever be built there or anywhere nearby, especially back in the horse-and-wagon days. That segment ended right around the trailhead here, and then continued east along more or less the present-day route of the old highway as far as Elowah Falls, then home to another sawmill. The Bridal Veil timber company was behind the proposal, and some suspected that the plan wasn't to actually build the road as proposed, but to establish a public right of way across the land of nearby landowners, with the goal of eventually putting an enormous log flume through there. Some neighboring landowners were surprised to find their signatures had been forged on the petition, when they didn't actually support the proposal. One filed an objection noting that the road would be useless to him, as it was too steep for horses to climb while pulling an empty wagon.

So what next? What's the future of this place? The key thing to know is that the land is a piece of Benson State Park (like the lake next to Multnomah Falls) and is not owned by the Forest Service, and the state will probably never have the money to do anything with this place; they may not even know they own it. The lot was recently added to Google Maps as "Parking to hike to Multnomah Falls", and as that idea takes hold it'll start filling up before sunrise like every other place marked as Multnomah Falls parking. If you put up an official sign and drew attention to the place, either as Multnomah Falls economy parking or for the falls here, you would immediately have a parking nightmare on your hands, and I'm not sure where additional parking could possibly go; the other side of the road is a cliff, but (looking at street view from I-84 not quite a sheer cliff, so maybe a few parking spots could go there with a bit of creative cantilevering. And then revive the bit of spur trail so people have somewhere nearby to go instead of it just providing a longer way to either Multnomah Falls or the Oneonta area. And figure out how your signage should break it to midsummer tourists that the falls might have gone dry for the year and they really should have visited back in March while they were still semi-awesome. It would almost certainly accrue a bunch of one-star Yelp and Google reviews from the sort of tourist who doesn't get the whole "nature" thing, and thinks there's a hidden control room somewhere behind the scenes where a bored bureaucrat controls all the valves to turn the waterfalls off and on, while people at the other control panels handle the weather and the animatronic wildlife.

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Footnote(s) 1. Insect stuff

More specifically, the species is known from one male and one female specimen, both collected here in April 1989, along with several collected at Mist Falls around the same time. All of them are now part of the 10 million specimen Entomology Collection at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The 1992 paper describing F. constricta is here:

Wiggins GB, Wisseman RW. NEW NORTH AMERICAN SPECIES IN THE GENERA NEOTHREMMA AND FARULA, WITH HYPOTHESES ON PHYLOGENY AND BIOGEOGRAPHY (TRICHOPTERA: UENOIDAE). The Canadian Entomologist. 1992;124(6):1063-1074. doi:10.4039/Ent1241063-6

The paper is unfortunately paywalled and I'm not sure I want to shell out $36 just to read it, JSTOR doesn't carry the journal, and unfortunately Sci-Hub has an incomplete copy of that issue, ending before it gets around to the paper in question. So that appears to be a dead end, but that's modern science for ya. Here's the abstract for it, at least:

Three new species are described in the caddisfly family Uenoidae: Neothremma prolata, from Hood River County, Oregon; Neothremma mucronata from Lassen County, California; and Farula constricta from Multnomah County, Oregon. Following examination of the holotypes of several species, misinterpretation of the male genitalia morphology of Farula wigginsi Denning is corrected, leading to the recognition of that name as a junior synonym of F. petersoni Denning. Interpretation of male genitalic morphology in the original description of F. geyseri Denning is revised. Phylogenetic relationships are inferred from male genitalic morphology for the species of Neothremma and Farula. Biogeographic patterns of the species in both genera are highly congruent with the phylogenies.

Let me just point out that coauthor Wiggins had the rare privilege of debunking Farula wigginsi, a proposed new species that someone else had named in his honor.

Falls Creek Falls, Skamania County

Next up we're visiting another highlight of SW Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest: A stupendous 335' waterfall that's been saddled with the unimaginative name "Falls Creek Falls". This is located on Forest Service land in the Wind River country north of Carson, WA, the same general area as Panther Creek Falls, which we visited about a year ago. If you've been to that one in person, imagine it with even more water and over twice as tall, and you'll have an inkling of what Skamania County's Falls Creek Falls is like. Naturally there's an OregonHikers page about the easy trail to the falls, as do GaiaGPS, and Friends of the Gorge.

AllTrails has one for that trail, and the longer route you'll need to use in the winter due to seasonal road closures, plus a longer loop that also takes you to another viewpoint above the falls.

In addition to those, there are a couple of other trailheads off the gravel road to the falls, about a mile shy of the falls trailhead. These just access a couple of extremely easy short loop trails you can stop and explore on your way, but I would encourage people to stop and have a look around at least once if you're in the area, since they're something you don't encounter very often: A pair of ongoing forestry science experiments begun by the Forest Service's nearby Wind River Experimental Forest around a century ago. Apparently this area near the falls had been clearcut a few years before that (which is probably also when the road was built), so the area was seen as sort of a blank slate, where you could plant trees per your hypothesis and then check back every few few years or decades to see how they're doing, without interference from other existing trees. One experiment aimed to determine how far apart you should space your Douglas Fir saplings when replanting after a clearcut, while the other planted a plot with seedlings all of the same spruce species, but grown from seeds taken from all across the tree's natural range to compare how they fared here. If you want to know how either of these experiments turned out, you'll want to take the trail to its far end where a vintage sign will explain what they've learned so far, though the spacing study one that I looked at appears to have been last updated sometime in the early 1960s.

If you're looking for a longer hike, Alltrails also documents a 23 mile out-and-back route that continues up Falls Creek past the falls to an equestrian campground. My impression has been that a lot of trails around the Gifford Pinchot seem to be horse-friendly. I'm not sure it's a majority of trails, but it seems to be pretty common. And yet, on the other hand, I can't remember the last time I encountered a horse out on the trail. (Ok, other than this one city park in Lake Oswego that sits next to an upscale riding club stable) I don't know what to make of that -- is owning a horse less popular than it used to be? Or maybe it's just trail riding out in nature that's less popular than it was decades ago? Did they overbuild during a brief horse fad, like they did with waterski facilities? (And on the other hand, fear of overbuilding is one reason cities were so reluctant to build skate parks at first, until teen skaters grew up and a few of them became city park officials or city council members. I don't know, but I can tell you, based on things I've heard from multiple horse-owning friends, that owning a horse in 2024 is rather expensive and time consuming, sort of like owning a highly flatulent sailboat.

I started this post assuming there would be a bunch of old news articles to pass along about the place, with vintage group photos of hikers in uncomfortable 1890s hiking gear posing in front of the falls, and colorful stories in the motoring section about setting out to prove you can indeed make it to the falls in style in a swanky new Pierce-Arrow sedan. I was surprised to find there was almost none of that in the papers, and unless I've missed something the first time this specific waterfall was mentioned by name in a Portland-area newspaper was actually a Roberta Lowe column in the Oregon Journal, 1982. Which is very strange, given the size and volume and (relative) proximity to Portland.

After getting a bit more creative with search terms I located a 1921 Oregonian article that mentions the falls. It seems the Forest Service was gearing up to sell lots for summer cabins near Government Mineral Springs -- similar to what they were doing along US 26 on the way to Mount Hood -- and heading a list of points of interest in the surrounding countryside is "the 700-foot falls on Falls Creek". As inaccurate as that number is, there aren't any other reasonable candidates for what place they had in mind.

It's almost like they were avoiding the name. My personal theory is that a newspaper editor or two objected to it, on the grounds that "Falls Creek Falls" (and its "Fall Creek Falls" variant, for that matter) cannot possibly be a serious legal name, for chicken-and-egg reasons, and forbade anyone from using that abomination of a name in print. I can't prove this is what happened, but it's exactly the sort of curmudgeonly thing that newspaper editors live for, if their city doesn't have its own masked crimefighting superhero for the editor to obsess over.

Longtime readers might have come into this expecting me to go on about the name in roughly the same way, but without the 8am gin shots and constant cigar chomping and periodic screaming, and somehow even more pedantic about it. And ok, that was one potential direction I could have gone with this post. But then I ran across something a lot more interesting to share with you instead.

A few years ago there was a very large study of US regional dialects, with a lot of emphasis on mapping out which of various common terms people used for a particular thing. The two that seemingly everyone knows about are 1.) the generic term for a carbonated beverage being "coke" across the South, "pop" across most of the midwest, and "soda" in New England, the West Coast, and right-thinking people everywhere. And 2.) the bewildering variety of terms for an oblong sandwich usually made with deli meats and cheeses, where the country defaults to "sub" wherever there isn't a local term for the same thing (hoagie/grinder/po'boy/etc.).

So it turns out there's a clear geographic divide in the use of "Falls Creek" vs "Fall Creek", both as a creek name and as a waterfall name, with Washington State strongly preferring "Falls", and Oregon siding with "Fall". Here's a table with numbers from the World Waterfall Database and the USGS Board on Geographic Names.

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Area	NWWS: 'Falls Creek Falls'	NWWS: 'Fall Creek Falls'	USGS: 'Falls Creek Falls'	USGS: 'Fall Creek Falls'	USGS: 'Falls Creek'	USGS: 'Fall Creek'
Ore.	4	16	0	3	7	62
Wash.	16	1	2	0	26	13
Idaho	2	4	0	1	15	29
Calif.	0	1	0	0	16	8
Alaska		-	0	0	23	9
Mont.		-	0	0	2	20
Wyo.		-	0	0	6	9
Colo.		-	0	0	5	16
World	82	110
USA			5	2	142	234

And here are a couple of maps (based on nationwide USGS search results) to help visualize the situation. The blue dots are instances of "Falls Creek", while red dots represent "Fall Creek", picked because those are the queries that return the most data points.

As you can hopefully see here, "Falls" is preferred across WA, northern Idaho, and the mountainous parts of Montana, plus Alaska. "Fall" is strongly preferred in OR, and used (I think) exclusively south of a line somewhere around Salem. That line might actually be the 45th parallel or something close to it, or we could make it a geology dad joke and just call it the "Fall" Line. In any case, south of Salem there isn't another "Falls Creek" anything until southern California. There aren't enough of either variant in the Southwest or Midwest (and apparently all of Canada for that matter) for any discernable pattern to emerge. Then along the East Coast "Fall" is more prevalent south of the Virginia-West Virginia border and "Falls" is more common north of there.

A few other scattered name variants exist: Oregon has one "Fall River Falls" and one "Falls City Falls" (and I have a still-unfinished draft post about the latter), while Washingon has one "Falls Camp Falls", one "Falls Lake Falls" and a "Falls View Falls". There are also a few variants only found outside the Pacific Northwest that track regional synonyms for "creek": "Fall(s) Branch Falls" in southern Appalachia, with one outlier in Texas; "Fall(s) Brook Falls" in mountainous parts of the Northeast, roughly Pennsylvania thru Maine; a "Fall Hollow Falls" in Tennessee; a "Fall Kill Falls" in New York; a few "Fall River Falls" with no discernable pattern across the country; and a couple of "Fall Run Falls" in PA. "Waterfall Creek Falls" is only used in a handful of places in the US, but dozens of them exist across Australia and New Zealand.

I can think of at least one other vastly overused name with at least two common variants: "Rocky Creek" is common across Southern states, while everyone else goes with "Rock Creek". Relatedly, "Rocky Branch" sounds like the pure mountain stream your grandpa (allegedly!) used for his legendary moonshine, always two steps ahead of the confounded revenuers, while "Rock Branch" just sounds fake, a name the revenuers might use in a failed sting operation.

I don't have an obvious explanation for this difference. To make a place name official, the proposal typically goes through a state-level agency or designated authority first before the USGS gets a look at it -- the Oregon Historical Society handles vetting proposed names here, for example -- and whoever it is might standardize on using one variant or the other, hopefully based on existing local usage, but possibly just the opinion of one old guy with a bowtie who thinks one or the other feels "more grammatical" somehow, but can't explain why exactly. Whatever the reason, this is bound to magnify existing patterns over time, or create them if there isn't already a pattern. And now from looking at those maps you might think everyone has a strongly held opinion about this like they do about exactly what to call a sandwich and exactly what goes on it. Where honestly I don't think anybody cares that much, myself included. The mysterious part is just that the Columbia River is usually not a linguistic divide, and I don't know why it would be one in this case.

I could just blame the whole mess on unimaginative and barely-literate pioneers again, but let's suppose it's something else entirely. Let's suppose that the name -- in either variant -- is a literal translation of the original (and very common) Sasquatch place name, which is unpronounceable with human vocal cords. The Columbia River would have been a natural linguistic barrier back in their heyday, as Sasquatches were never strong swimmers and never discovered the art of boatbuilding, and so the Northern and Southern dialects of their language would have slowly diverged over time after the original Bridge of the Gods collapsed and eroded away. I'm not saying this is exactly what happened; I'm just saying that it's the only theory I've got that fits the available evidence.

Upper Beaver Falls

Back in 2020 we paid a visit to Columbia County's Beaver Falls, located between Rainier and Clatskanie along a surviving stretch of the old Lower Columbia River Highway. Few people realize anymore that the famous Columbia River Highway was more than just a few photogenic miles of windy road through the Columbia Gorge, and it once crossed the whole state, west to east, under a variety of names. The LCRH was the portion that continued downstream from Portland all the way to Astoria and Seaside. That route was never as spectacular as the HCRH through the Gorge, but it had a number of scenic highlights along the way... almost all of which were then bypassed in the 1950s and 1960s in the name of progress, where "progress" just meant getting to Astoria as quickly as possible, And to some the current road was just a temporary intermediate state in a wider modernization effort; in 1964, Gov. Hatfield proposed extending Interstate 80N (today's Interstate 84) all the way to Astoria, explaining that it was justified by "the industrial development on the Lower Columbia River".

In any event, that post ended up being rather long because I was encountering much of this history for the first time. Somewhere among all my nested tangents I mentioned there was one more waterfall along Beaver Creek, or at least one more, but I had missed the place to pull off the road for it, and didn't feel like going back for another go at stopping there. Then earlier this summer I had the idea to head out to Astoria since I hadn't been there in years, and at least go see the Peter Iredale shipwreck and Youngs River Falls and then take it from there. So I figured I might as well check off this TODO list item while I was heading through the area.

So with that lengthy introduction, here we are at Upper Beaver Falls, which looks like your average 15' roadside waterfall in the Northwest. Unlike a lot of these it isn't marred by an ugly concrete fish ladder from the 1950s, since the 50' waterfall downstream is an insurmountable barrier to salmon, and neither waterfall is much of an obstacle to the legendary anadromous beaked whales I mentioned in a 2020 post about Ecola Falls (which is upstream of Multnomah Falls). Unlike its downstream sibling, the little falls here aren't protected by a semi-forgotten county park, so in theory some private landowner might try to mark it off limits at some point, though at least part of it probably falls within the old highway right of way, plus the state may very well own the creek itself, so long as it's "navigable" -- which may involve someone taking one for the team and going over the lower falls in a kayak. I couldn't find any evidence that anyone has done this, but it might be possible; the pool below Beaver Falls is supposedly quite deep, and there are a lot of YouTube videos showing people going over much taller waterfalls than this in kayaks and surviving and going on and on about how stoked they were about it. (Disclaimer: As always, Legal says I have to tell you not to do this, and common sense dictates that when I -- a non-kayaker and non-xtreme-sports person -- say something looks doable, basing that entirely on stuff I've seen other people do in other locations on YouTube, that is not a legally binding promise that it is, in fact, doable, and you and/or your next of kin can't sue me for putting some cockamamie idea in your head. Are we clear on this? Thx.)

Finally, I should note that there's room for more than one car at the falls, and there was a weird bit of drama going on among the other people there when I stopped by, as I tried to explain over on the 'Gram:

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Foxglove Falls

Next up we're taking a peek (albeit not a very close peek) at the Columbia Gorge's Foxglove Falls. This is the waterfall you can see looking east from the top of Angels Rest, tumbling down the far wall of the deep canyon on that side of the viewpoint. I think it's right about here on the state LIDAR map. The canyon is due to Dalton Creek, which we've visited a couple of times downstream in the Dalton Point and Old Boneyard Road posts, and we were in the vicinity of in the Backstrand Road post. The creek is just not very big, and just goes to show what a little water can do to solid rock (albeit relatively weak and crumbly solid rock) over geological time.

As far as I know the Angels Rest viewpoint is the closest mere mortals can get to it without advanced technical gear and skills that I don't have. Although way back in 1918 there was a short-lived proposal to turn the whole Angels Rest area into a private tourist attraction, complete with pack mule trail rides just like at the Grand Canyon, promising great views of the hanging gardens above Dalton Creek among other things. That obviously never panned out, and I'm not sure how serious of an idea it ever was, as the proposal was just one of a series of real estate and stock schemes that had played out over the previous few years. The most serious of these plans involved the backers laying their grubby hands on the bankrupt woolen mill at Pendleton, relocating it to a new company town right at Wahkeena Falls (then known as "Gordon Falls"), damming Wahkeena Creek to power the mill, and Dalton Creek to supply water to Gordon Falls City (the future great metropolis of the western Gorge) and of course selling a bunch of unregulated stock to finance this exciting new 100% guaranteed goldmine. Except that the deal fell through when local interests in Pendleton bought the woolen mill instead, and shareholders in the Gordon Falls Co. lost every cent of their money overnight. It was never clarified whether the backers knew this was about to happen, but they somehow managed to hold onto the land after the company cratered and soon tried a few other moneymaking schemes continuing into the 1920s, like the pack mule adventure park, and at least one proposal to build mansions all over the top of Angels Rest, before eventually losing the land over unpaid taxes during the Depression.

If you're wondering why the waterfall isn't called "Dalton Falls", after the creek, I'm afraid it's a long story. There was a minor local internet controversy about this back in the mid-2000s, and like most internet controversies it was never really resolved to anyone's satisfaction. The name currently applies to a prominent seasonal waterfall on a different creek just west of Mist Falls (and right around HCRH Milepost 31), which we've visited a couple of times, here and here. A theory gained currency that this mismatch was a fairly recent mistake, either by uninformed people on the early internet, possibly echoing a misguided guidebook author or two in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s. The name and location of the creek (and its mouth at Dalton Point) were pretty well documented, thanks to various surveys and property records, so (the idea went) the real Dalton Falls should be somewhere around here too.

Eventually people settled on the waterfall below (and semi-glimpse-able from) Angels Rest as the most likely candidate, the theory being that it was probably named not long after the area was logged, and it would have been a lot more prominent back then. And I think that's the explanation I've repeated here a few times. But then the Eagle Creek Fire happened, and that made Foxglove Falls much easier to see from the Angels Rest viewpoint (like in the photos here), and closer to what people would have seen a century ago. But it still isn't a prominent sight from down on the old highway. So now I'm not really sure anymore. As in, maybe the creek and the falls were always in different watersheds, a testament to the once-widespread fame of the mysterious W. Dalton they're both named for. The name seems to have existed already when the old highway was still under construction, so maybe the falls are a lot more prominent when seen from further away, like on a steamboat heading upriver (for example), than they are from the HCRH. That's certainly true for Mist Falls as well as the "Dalton Falls" at milepost 31, where up close you can only see the very lowest tier of the falls. But then, making an accurate, detailed map from a steamboat was subject to its own hazards back then, like having a bourbon or three too many, losing all your money playing cards with a friendly gentleman named after a state (or even worse, two states, like "Colorado Tex"), and then the friendly ladies wearing all those feathers abruptly stop paying attention to you after you run out of silver dollars. Why, it's enough to make a mild-mannered cartographer scribble "Dalton Falls" on just any old place, and we've been stuck with it ever since.

This whole thing would've been helped immeasurably if anyone had thought to make a clearly labeled set of daguerreotypes of second-tier Gorge landmarks back in the day, but no examples of that have surfaced so far. Barring that, the other thing that would resolve this pretty quickly would be newly-discovered evidence that W. Dalton was some kind of monster and needed cancelling. Like maybe he came west while on the run from charges back home in Alabama, where he was accused of mistreating his many, many slaves. Or something along those lines. And as a result every last thing that might have been named after him, here and across the northwest, would have to be renamed.

Meanwhile the name "Foxglove Falls" is relatively recent, originating in a 2007 OregonHikers thread as a way to sidestep arguments about various things named Dalton. It featured in a number of forum threads there after the name was invented:

• April 2007: "Hidden in plain sight: a waterfall at Angels Rest!"
• February 2008: "Foxglove Falls 2-9-08"
• late February 2008: "Angels Rest via Foxglove Canyon"
• late February 2010: "Guess where I went today..(Revealed: Foxglove creek) 2-20-10"
• Early December 2010: "Foxglove Creek"
• Mid-December 2010: "Dalton Falls to Mist Falls Loop 12/19/10"
• Late December 2010: "Dalton - Foxglove Conundrum"
• Later December 2010: "Mesachie Creek"
• Mid-December 2013: "No Waterfalls on Devils Rest 11-Dec-2013"
• Late December 2013: "Angel's Rest (Nostalgia) Trip! (Dec 27)"
• March 2017: Angel's Rest direct (bowl to the east)"
• December 2018: "Palmer Mill Rd/Primrose Path - Dec 7, 2018"

It also has a Northwest Waterfall Survey page now, and generally seems pretty established at this point. The page wisely doesn't hazard a guess as to how tall it might be; the LIDAR link up above points at what looks like the most prominent single drop in a series of closely spaced drops, each in the 20'-40' range, with the creek rushing steeply downhill between them, and at one end of the scale you could point at the one bit I think I have photos of, which might be in the 40' range. Lumping them together with the top here and the bottom here gives a total height of 220', while pulling in everything from the very top to the point where all four main tributary creeks join together here comes to 436', almost exactly 11x as tall as the low-end number. So that's not especially useful, as vital statistics go.

Regarding the new namesake: Foxglove is not native to the Pacific Northwest, but you may see it growing as an invasive plant in the Angels Rest area. It seems that decades ago, someone involved in building or maintaining the unofficial trail network above Angels Rest was also an amateur gardener, and as this was before the modern environmental movement got going, it seemed like a good idea at the time to combine two hobbies and improve the forest with some of their favorite ornamental plants, and then name a few of the trails after what's planted along them. So until quite recently there were three trails named Foxglove (Foxglove Way, along with the Upper and Lower Foxglove Trails), and a steep, rocky Primrose Path that apparently needed a re-primrosing on a fairly regular basis, and I think a couple of other plant-themed ones whose names escape me at the moment.

Sometime around January 2022, another anonymous individual decided three trails was entirely too many Foxgloves and unilaterally renamed a couple of them. Renamed them in the OregonHikers Field Guide wiki, and on OpenStreetMap, and even posted freshly-made hand-carved wooden signs at all of the affected trail junctions, replacing the few decades-old ones that had survived the Eagle Creek Fire. Whether you like the change or not, you have to respect that level of dedication.

Lower Bridge Creek Falls

In the previous post (that is, the one about Bridge Creek Falls, in the Oregon Coast Range), I forgot to even mention that it has a downstream sibling. Lower Bridge Creek Falls is easier to see in that you don't have to race across busy Highway 6 to see it. The creek drops at least as far as the upper falls, I think, and it drops onto rocks next to the Wilson River -- and it probably goes straight into the river during the wet season.

But snobs and pedants and internet busybodies of all types turn up their noses at it, because the creek travels under Highway 6 in a pipe and you can see the pipe from some angles, and if your really overthink it a bunch it kinda-sorta looks a bit like it might be untreated outflow from some chemical plant going into a river full of endangered species. That isn't what it is, of course, and (as far as I know) the stream is just as pristine as anything else in the Coast Range. It is probably true that no matter how good your photos of it are, nobody will want a print of it on the wall of their outdoor gear store if it shows the creek coming out of a pipe. It's possible nobody will want a print of it on their wall, by the breakfast nook, strictly for aesthetic reasons. But, I mean, stuff like that can be covered up with a bit of Disney landscaping magic if need be, or the culvert and pipe could be replaced with a tiny little mini-bridge so it looks more natural from below, or who knows. Maybe plant some vines to deemphasize the WPA stonework under the bridge next to the falls, and swap out the ugly chainlink fence along the road, above the falls, with just about anything else that still works as a fence. I dunno, that probably wouldn't help. To misquote Upton Sinclair, there's just no pleasing people whose livelihoods depend on rage clicks.

On the other hand, the internet being internet-level mad about this one means there isn't much about it on the interwebs, and I can point you at all of it, or at least everything that Google thinks is worth indexing -- which seems to be less and less original human-created content as time goes on. Pages at Waterfalls West, My Wild Adventure, and Exploring My Life, and a cameo in an OregonHikers trip report. Also a couple of stock photos on Alamy, and a clip of stock video footage on something called Pond5, and a brief YouTube video from 2013. And that last one I only found thru DDG, even though Google and YouTube are parts of the same vast, lumbering monolith and you'd think its search tentacle would do an excellent job of indexing its video tentacle, wouldn't you? But no, or at least not anymore.

Bridge Creek Falls

Next we're paying a quick visit to Bridge Creek Falls, in the Oregon Coast Range right off Highway 6, at the Tillamook State Forest's "Footbridge Day Use Area and Trailhead". Like most of the recreation spots along Highway 6, the turnoff is a bit awkward and you'll miss it entirely if you blink at the wrong time.

Getting to the falls from the parking lot is not difficult if you know what you're doing. The one exciting part is that the falls are on the other side of the highway, so you have to walk back up to the road, look for the trail on the other side of the highway, and sprint across when nobody's coming. Be patient and wait as long as you need to, or come back a different day when the road isn't packed with seniors in RVs and angry business dudes in BMWs who desperately want to pass the RVs. Or more precisely, they paid good money for that M5, and Highway 6 would be an ideal road for doing M5 stuff except for that one stupid RV chugging along at 20mph. Now if there was just a good place to whip around those geezers and really floor it the way its Bavarian creators intended... which in practice means you get to catch up to the next RV that much faster. And somehow there's always another RV up there chugging away. Passing one RV is easy. Passing another one every 10 minutes is annoying but doable. But somehow, passing all of them is a whole different sort of problem, and might involve some variation on Zeno's paradox.

Assuming you don't get M5'd while crossing the street, there's an old sign for the trail. It's the only sign, for the only trail, you can't miss it. The first thing you'll notice are stairs. And not just any stairs, created with dirt and boards and maybe some chicken wire. No, these are carved stone stairs, made by people who knew what they were doing, and they don't look recent. What you're looking at is a vestige of the 1930s WPA project that created Highway 6 in more or less its current form. Modernizing the old Wilson River Road became urgent after summer 1933, when the northern Coast Range was devastated by the first of the Tillamook Burn series of forest fires. At one point the new road was planned to open by December 1936, per this map, but that goal slipped due to funding and construction difficulties. Over the course of the year, the project was repeatedly funded and canceled, and authorities quarreled over things they should have worked out before starting, like who was paying for what, and whether the road could legally charge tolls.

Things continued along that way for a few more years, and eventually 1941 rolled around and the road was finally almost ready to open. So they announced a grand opening gala for August 19th, but quickly canceled that, blaming it on a typo. Then the September 19 date was rained out, and the new road finally opened without fanfare in October 1941. The state planned to treat this as a sort of soft opening and still have the planned grand opening gala in the following spring. I couldn't find any indication that this ever actually happened. I imagine that, like a lot of big plans, it just sort of fell by the wayside after Pearl Harbor.

During all that news about the roadwork, there wasn't anything in the paper about their plans for the Bridge Creek area specifically, or a list of places that were be brought up to WPA standards. The latter would be interesting in case there are other examples of their design work along the way, but forgotten out there in the forest somewhere. And maybe there are still records of a master plan on file somewhere, though I'm not sure who gets those after the responsible federal agency is abolished, like the WPA was. Maybe the National Archives would have that? In any case, Oregon newspapers did not mention Bridge Creek Falls by name until the 2020s: First a March 2020 roundup of scenic Coast Range waterfalls worth visiting, and again in October 2021 as one of the highlights of the Wilson River Trail.

Some links from around the interwebs, mostly concerning the falls, the river, the footbridge over the river, and the various trails radiating out from the far side of the bridge.

• OregonWaterfalls
• Waterfall Record
• PNW Photo Blog
• Aaron's Waterfall World
• The Outdoor Project
• The Hiking Project
• Trail Run Project
• Oregon Discovery
• The Narrative Image
• Day by Day - Rock Climbing & Life
• Wandering Yuncks
• my morning moxie
• Paul's Bizarre Website

Oh, and there's also

another Bridge Creek Falls in Oregon, in Deschutes County, upstream of famous Tumalo Falls. That waterfall was even mentioned once in the Oregonian a few years before the coastal one, in a 2017 article about things to do in the Bend area.

Little Jack Falls

Next up we're visiting another obscure waterfall along the lower Columbia River. Little Jack Falls is a short distance from Jack Falls, on an abandoned stretch of the old Lower Columbia River Highway, outside of tiny Prescott, OR, where the old Trojan nuclear plant used to be. The state still owns the old stretch of road, and it's still largely passable with one big exception we'll get to shortly (or you'll just see in the photoset here).

Getting to the falls involves simply walking along the old road for a bit, and you can start at either the bottom or the top. I've only been there via the lower sorta-trailhead so far, and that route involves parking somewhere near the US 30 intersection with Graham Road, then crossing 30 when it's safe, and looking for a trail starting around where concrete barriers turn into metal guardrails. From there, follow the old highway uphill until you get to Jack Falls, first. Have a look at the falls, and the cute little historic bridge that the creek goes over, then keep going uphill until you get to Little Jack Falls. You can't miss it, or I hope you can't, because sadly the original LCRH bridge that was here is completely gone now, and absentmindedly falling into the gap would mean a long tumble down a steep slope to the edge of the present-day highway.

If the way here, and especially the area right around the falls, look a bit less natural and magical than similar spots in the Gorge, it might be the invasive ivy currently overrunning the vicinity. The airquote-fun detail about this situation is that it was intentional, at first. A 1915 Oregonian article concerning a long drive from Portland to Astoria in a shiny new Reo automobile mentions that the original landscaping around the base of Little Jack Falls included decorative plantings of ivy, for a complete dumbass reason. A 1920 state highway report includes some photos of the ongoing roadwork along this stretch of the highway, then under construction, and the whole area had obviously been clearcut shortly before the road went in. So to make it look less bare and desolate here, they planted one of the rare few things that isn't an improvement over bare dirt.

The ivy situation really complicates things here, if the state ever decides to renovate this stretch of the old highway. The ivy isn't just a nasty invasive plant, it's also an important part of the historical context and built landscape around here, and that would make it illegal, verging on sacreligious, to ever tear it out or let goats nibble on it, or otherwise prevent it from spreading as it sees fit. So that ought to be an especially fun series of angry public meetings.

Also, Little Jack Falls is almost certainly haunted, if you believe in that sort of thing. As noted in the Jack Falls post, there used to be a collection of abandoned buildings either here or at the other waterfall, depending on which oral history you believe, and that spot became a hideout for a gang of outlaws, but they all died in a shootout and their loot has never been found (and is presumably still around here somewhere). Couple of additional strange incidents happened here, decades later, which makes me think Little Jack is the waterfall with the outlaw ghosts and the hidden treasure: In August 1922, an intercity bus was driving along through here when a man randomly shot two fellow passengers just as they passed Little Jack Falls, killing one of them. Then in 1947 a duck hunter parked at the falls, intending to go hunting in the nearby marshes (close where the nuclear plant would be decades later), and was never seen again. Ok, that or he turned up uneventfully after the media lost interest and lived happily ever after, possibly under a new name. Most likely it was one of those things or the other, at any rate. If a lost hunter from 1947 somehow encountered sci-fi atomic radiation from 1997 and became a kaiju-sized ravenous man-duck hybrid, you'd think someone would have noticed by now. Unless maybe he's not ready to burst forth from underground yet, in which case he'll probably show up in 2047 after marinating in bad swamp mojo for a century, and comic-book radiation for the second half of that century. But it wouldn't hurt to keep a closer eye on the area in 2027 and 2037 in case I got the math wrong somehow.

On a more cheerful note, I think you said earlier that you wanted to know where the name came from. And to that end we have a 1915 Oregon Journal article that explains the falls are named for the young son of District Engineer Thompson. The article does not explain whether Jack Falls is also named after the kid and the "Little" describes the falls, or maybe the kid was "Little Jack" and Jack Falls is named after his dad. Some future historian with access to more sources will have to figure that one out for us.

One feature of the upper route (and thus not pictured here) is the old Prescott Point Viaduct, which was considered an engineering marvel of its day (though bridge pedants would like to point out that it's technically just a half-viaduct). Some photos on that page show another reason why they used this route and not the current one, namely that the present-day route was either part of the river, or a river-adjacent swamp, back then, and the route only became buildable after levees went in, around 1938-39. The half-viaduct here and another elsewhere cost $5k in 1918 dollars.

Unlike Jack Falls down the road, the creek is apparently not part of anyone's water supply. The eponymous Little Jack Falls Water System -- the local utility for a handful of area residents -- draws from a nearby spring and not the creek itself. I know this thanks to their 2001 state licensing form (if you're curious what one of those looks like), which also tells us the current operators (as of 2001) had owned & run it since 1976. This factoid is not really relevant to much of anything; it's mostly that while researching a different waterfall post I realized that small water utilities were effectively unregulated in Oregon until the early 1980s, and what came out of your tap could be a real crapshoot, scatological pun intended. And yes, that was a transparent attempt to get visitors to go read a second post here, even though I don't make a penny off this weird little blog either way.