The next installment in our ongoing waterfall thing takes us back to McCord Creek in the Columbia Gorge once again, where we're finally paying a visit to Upper McCord Creek Falls. The main event here is the much larger Elowah Falls, which I did a post about wayyyy back in 2008. As I recall -- this was like 18 years ago now and I may have some details wrong -- I had a rare and precious morning of no AM meetings (or at least none where my absence would be noticed), and headed to the Gorge for a short hike with a shiny new DSLR I was trying to get the hang of. (The linked post shows I came away with distinctly mixed results, I have to say in retrospect.) The traditional McCord Creek hiking route is sort of a Y-shaped twofer: After a short distance in from the trailhead, you hit a signed trail junction. The path to the left goes to Elowah Falls, and the other one to the right heads to Upper McCord Creek Falls. So you just pick one, follow it to the named waterfall, then backtrack to the junction and do the other. So that was the plan, but I got busy fiddling around with the new camera at Elowah Falls and ran out of time for the "B side" of the hike that day. As I recall, I had to get back to the office in order to leverage some proactive synergies outside the box on a go-forward basis, thereby placing all the wood behind the arrow, and my presence was essential for this one. I did jot down a TODO item to go back and take a few photos of the upper falls for the sake of completeness, but doing that by itself just never seemed compelling enough to become a top priority.
I did swing by in mid-2017 to take some bridge photos for a different project, but shortly after that the Eagle Creek Fire put the whole area off limits for several years. These photos are from May 2021, which IIRC was just days or a week or two after the area finally reopened, coinciding with the fun and all-too-brief "Mission Accomplished" phase of the not-really-post-pandemic era.
Before we get into the big rambling historical timeline section, a quick comment about the name situation. The lower falls are "Elowah Falls", while the upper falls go by "Upper McCord Creek Falls", and it's weird and inconsistent and I don't like it, and we'll cover how it got that way down in the timeline part. So I thought I'd check the shiny new and improved USGS place name GIS server to see what it said about the upper falls and exactly who came up with this silly naming scheme. And I saw... absolutely nothing. There is no database entry for the falls under any name, which means the dumb current naming scheme is still fixable. So I'm hereby launching a national, no, global but mostly national lobbying campaign to call them "Upper Elowah Falls" instead. I'm going to conduct this campaign in my usual way, by explaining how things ought to be once or twice on the Internet and then waiting patiently for public opinion to come around, which I've noticed can sometimes take quite a while. In the meantime, the two names are equally legal, so don't be surprised if you see both names. "Upper McCord" because old newspaper articles tend to use it, and it (hopefully) keeps the search engines happy, and "Upper Elowah" because it's just better.
Timeline
- January 1910 article on the proposed new highway goes into great detail on the proposed route, including how the route at "Kelly Creek" would avoid conflicting with the railroad. A March 1915 construction update used the same name. A May 1915 update also used "Kelly Creek" while noting "Pierce Creek" was an alternate name for the same place.
- A January 1915 list of scenic crown jewels of the area, mentions "Pierce Creek Falls", a few months out from the Big Renaming
- The invented name "Elowah Falls" was unveiled in April 1915 along with a number of other fanciful quasi-sorta-Indian place names throughout the Gorge. The Mazamas committee that did this made it very clear that they were only renaming the lowest and most accessible waterfall on any given creek, which resulted in our destination today being named "Upper McCord" instead of "Upper Elowah", and the creek somehow not being "Elowah Creek". Turns out they made "McCord Creek" official at the same time Elowah was introduced, naming the creek after the early pioneer who built the first fishwheel on the Columbia right here at the mouth of the creek, beginning the era of modern industrial-scale overfishing. So that's not entirely great, if you ask me.
- W.R. McCord's 1923 obit -- so yeah, he was still around when they named the creek after him, which is also not great -- states he was a carpenter by trade and came to Oregon by wagon in 1850, where he helped build the first steamboat on the Willamette that same year, and ended up building fishwheels since that was a big growth industry at the time. Eventually he invented the snailshell fishwheel, which was the proverbial better mousetrap except for salmon, the world beat a path to his door, he beat a patent troll in court and lived happily ever after, basically.
- As an aside, regarding fishwheels: This device is incredibly simple and far too effective. It's just a waterwheel that spins in the current like any other, but with nets or baskets instead of regular flat paddles. You would search around and find a spot where salmon tend to congregate on their migration upstream, and build your fishwheel there. As it spins in the current, any fish that happen to congregate in the wrong spot are simply scooped out of the river and transported away for, er, processing. Any fish that notices something might be amiss here and swims off to congregate somewhere else is home free, and yet this is all it took to drive most salmon species to near-extinction within a few decades. This leads us to the inescapable conclusion that salmon are literally dumb as rocks, even dumber than the average fish in the sea, and will just sit there watching placidly and doing nothing for self-preservation as the other salmon around them are scooped up by the barrel-ful. Frankly, between salmon and the local smelt industry, a lot of local fortunes in the Northwest were built by preying on perhaps the two biggest imbeciles in the ocean. Delicious imbeciles, but still. And then, just adding insult to injury, eating them has been promoted as a "brain food" on and off for decades.
- OregonHikers thread with an old photo of McCord Creek circa 1915, showing the falls, and the old pipeline that ran along where the upper trail is now. The blog side of Curious Gorge has some photos of the old Myron Kelly pulp mill here. A caption explains that the mill consumed fast-growing cottonwood trees, not Douglas fir. The main thing for right now is that you can see that the CCC workers had a head start on making a trail here.
- Sources differ on exactly what sort of business Kelly was engaged in. Some say he had a fish processing business, others say it was a pulp mill, but either way it needed a steady water supply, and somehow just taking water out of the creek as it flowed past his business wasn't sufficient. And beyond the piping, apparently he even dug a canal connecting McCord Creek with Moffett Creek, one watershed to the east (right about here, I think), presumably to divert more water into McCord Creek than would otherwise be there, or maybe it worked the other way around in case the creek was at flood stage, to protect his pipes and infrastructure downstream. I dunno, none of this makes a lot of sense to me. But then, I've never claimed to be that kind of engineer, so who knows. And I always try to remember, just because somebody built something doesn't mean it was a good idea or that it was built properly and worked as designed.
- Some of this may be confused with Frank Warren's Warren Packing Company cannery nearby in Warrendale. At its peak in the early 1880s, the company operated as many as 14 fishwheels at various locations along the Columbia, about a third of the total. And the Columbia was the global epicenter of the canned fish industry at the time, which meant Warren and his company were kind of a big deal for a while. The hamlet of Warrendale (or what's left of it now) is named after him, and for a time the business was profitable enough to support the Warrens in a life of luxury, such that after a long trip to Europe they set out for home aboard the shiny new RMS Titanic. As the story goes, after getting his family into a lifeboat, Frank Warren stayed behind helping others and became the only Oregon resident known to have died in that disaster. Salmon stocks had been in decline since the early 1880s, and the Warren company shut down not long after the sinking. And that's the point when Rod Serling cuts in and says something about the endless mysteries of the deep, and cosmic balances, and accounts being settled one way or another.
- The fishing and timber industries along the Columbia basically ran themselves out of business in the 1910s, by catching all the fish and cutting all the trees as fast as they could. After all of that cratered, obviously it was time to build a scenic highway and invite the world to come experience the pristine natural wonders. Usually a pivot like this takes a generation or two of waiting for the oldtimers to die off, but here the change happened within a couple of years. For example here are two articles from January 1916 explaining that an additional $12,855 would be needed in order to build out the initial, rather ambitious trail plan for the Gorge, and backers hoped the feds could be persuaded to chip in toward that number. Just $100 would be earmarked for the proposed McCord Creek Trail, as this was one of the less technical proposals at the time.
- Note that the original McCord Creek Trail was quite different from the present-day trail. It began right at the old McCord Creek bridge, back before it was incorporated into I-84 (and eventually replaced), and simply followed the creek 1/4 mile upstream until it got to the lower falls, and ended there.
- A September 1917 guide to the Forest Service portion of the Gorge reads like the trail had been built and was now open. It goes on to say "The trail is being built so that you can go back of the falls and look through the ever-moving, transparent curtain of water", which is a bit surprising since the present-day trail doesn't do this. I don't think there's even a side trail that does this. Maybe they never got around to building that part, or maybe it was closed at some point due to rockfall hazards.
- August 1919, early Trails Club group hike to the McCord Creek area, described as one of the wildest and most beautiful areas along the new Columbia River Highway. The invite mentions requiring hobnail shoes, and says they'd be exploring around the rock rim of Elowah Falls, as today's trail didn't exist yet. Getting there from Portland was another story, though: Would-be explorers were told to catch the early O.W.R.&N. train east from Portland and get off at the Warrendale station a short distance from McCord Creek.
An April 1926 hike blurb stating that the Trails Club would be paying another visit to the upper falls. Which, again, sounded like a serious challenge:
Trails Club To Climb. -- A hike along McCord creek to the upper falls, involving some steep climbing, will be made by the Trails club Sunday. The party will leave the Park and Yamhill stage terminal at 8:30 and hike seven miles from Warrendale. Members of the party will wear mountain climbing outfits, including hob-naled boots and gloves for rope work. The hike will be led by Fred Steeble.
The reason for all the gear is that the present-day trail inset into a sheer cliff did not exist yet, and would be built as a Depression-era CCC project. The place wasn't entirely pristine; as part of local logging operations, there was a water pipeline running along where the trail is now, built into a relatively soft rock layer that was easier to work with. Which gave someone the idea that a trail could run through the same spot. I have no idea what route this intrepid party might have taken in lieu of the current path.
- The 1927 Metsker map of the area indicates the land around the falls was still private property at this point, labeled as "Cont. Com. Bk.". Maybe that's short for "Continental Community Bank", or maybe it's "Commercial" instead of "Community"; the name doesn't ring a bell either way. but I don't claim to have an encyclopedic knowledge of historical local banks, and there isn't a whole lot of continuity between pre-1929 banks and present-day banks.
- September 1930: upcoming Mazamas hike noted they would be exploring the shiny new Nesmith Point Trail. Today it branches off the Elowah Falls trail before it encounters the main trail junction. But I'm not sure what the route was like originally; I haven't found a trail map from back then to verify this, but it's possible that today's trailhead only went to Nesmith Point at that point, and got repurposed after the original McCord Creek trailhead was lost to freeway construction. Or it may have not been the present-day trailhead, exactly, but there was a separate trailhead that just went to Nesmith Point.
- A May 1936 story belatedly telling readers all about the shiny new McCord Creek Trail extension to the upper falls, built the previous year by CCC work crews. Apparently this original trail was a bit different from today's version; the old trailhead was right at the old highway's McCord Creek Bridge, and hikers just followed the creek upstream to the falls, and continued on to today's Upper McCord side trail to get to the top. Or that's what I gather from the description, as no map is provided. The trailhead also featured a large log of petrified wood that had been uncovered by construction at some point. This log had recently been fenced off to discourage souvenir hunters, and I gather it was later dynamited as part of I-84 construction by aggressively unsentimental highway engineers. The paper had already written about people trying out the new trail for a while; they must have realized they had never actually done a grand opening announcement for the thing.
- Nov. 1935 -- Benson HS hiking club had a go at the new trail
- Same month, Jefferson HS students involved in dedicating the new trail
- February 1936: A photo on the Oregonian's "Pictorial Highlights" page showing a man in silhouette pondering a frozen Elowah Falls.
- 1937 photo of the now-sorta-protected petrified tree mentioned earlier.
June 1936 brought a deeply weird bit of amateur archeology by the Oregon Journal's editorial board, seemingly not their first excursion into the topic. Here it is in full, presented in Comic Sans for effect:
By Extinct RacesThe world over, and in all time, men have been killers. The cave men, in jungle days, were no exceptions -- the story of mankind has been war, war, war, even down to the late conquest of Ethiopia.
Rock fortifications near Mosier, in the Columbia Gorge and down the river from The Dalles, were recently described on this page. They are believed by geologists to have been the work of a race of pigmies in which the men were only 4 feet in stature and to have existed about the time of the Mayans.
Similar formations of piled rock are found near the summit of Wind Mountain, east of Carson, on the North Bank highway. The formations consist of several groups of rock terraces or breastworks in rows, one above another, at irregular intervals on the south and east slopes of the mountain. That the rockpiles were defense works of an extinct race seems certain, as behind the artificially built walls are trenches. Inquiry in the long ago of Indians in the district brought out no information as to when or by whom the fortifications were built. Back in 1908 there was a clearly defined trail up the mountainside on the north slope, but in 1926, when examination was made, it was difficult to locate the trail.
Another curious formation that is clearly the work of man is a source of interesting speculation. It is on the left side of the cliff, at the end of the ravine leading to McCord Creek Falls, on the upper Columbia River Highway. It consists of a roughly rounded mound about two feet high and about three feet in diameter. It was the top of a small bluff, the sides of which were cut away to form a narrow, flat platform surrounding it. At a lower level is a slightly wider platform, similarly formed. It, too, is unmistakably the work of man, and, being in full view of the falls, one can easily imagine impressive Indian or other ceremonials of savages being performed to the beat of the tom-tom and the "tum-tum" of the falling waters.
These mystic formations are the only written story of a past age and lost races. Geology should unravel them, and their meaning be interpreted to people in language they can understand. So translated and explained, the rock piles and other formations of the long, long, ago, converted into carefully kept parks in The Dalles area, would become a lure to attract many a sightseer.
Ok, so the piled rock structures on Wind Mountain are still generally seen as artificial, but the fortification theory went out of vogue decades ago. People eventually realized that mountaintop fortifications beyond a watchtower don't make sense unless you also have cannons and gunpowder so you can actually do something about the invaders besides just watch helplessly from above. I'll just note this theory was most popular in the decades right after World War I, when anything that might look a bit like a trench transported people back to the horrors of Flanders fields.
A present-day popular theory says something about young people going on vision quests and finding their spirit animals. But that really sounds like something New Agey white people would have dreamed up in the 70s, or something they'd have Chakotay go on about on Star Trek: Voyager in his role as a "rainforest Indian" of no particular tribe. (A situation Paramount got into thanks to inadvertently hiring a fake-Indian consultant to help define the character and his backstory.)
As for those elaborate ceremonial platforms at McCord Creek, I don't recall seeing any such thing anywhere near the upper or lower falls. I suppose if you're in a mindset to expect ancient ruins everywhere, you're going to see them everywhere, even if nobody else does. Of course we're a much more rational and advanced society now in 2025, and you don't just go around blaming unexplained maybe-structures on mysterious extinct people of a lost age. No, these days if you think your local present-day native people could not have pulled off a given construction project centuries ago, you can just claim they had help from space aliens and leave it at that, because nobody can really prove they didn't.
- Upcoming Pathfinders hike in July 1940, one of the few announced group hikes after the initial burst of enthusiasm.
- A very detailed article in the May 26th, 1940 Oregon Journal about the classic Mt. Hood - Columbia Gorge scenic loop drive. This was about the height of the route's scenic-ness, before highway engineers began bypassing the road's many attractions in the name of speed and efficiency and capital-P Progress. Naturally Elowah Falls gets a mention, though sharing the limelight with the petrified tree.
- 1942 letter to the editor, in regard to wartime scrap metal drives and the proposed scrapping of the old Battleship Oregon, pointing out there was plenty of rusty old metal just lying around the McCord Creek area and maybe we should gather it first before chopping up any major historical artifacts.
- The 1944 Metsker map shows the land was now (unsurprisingly) owned by "State of Oregon", and it even shows more or less where the falls are. It also highlights the first waterfall over on Moffett Creek, and shows that the old YWCA campground on the 1927 map was gone by 1944.
- The upper falls trail was the scene of a harrowing rescue in May 1945: A couple and a friend of theirs were descending the trail and stopped to admire the view. The friend leaned against the pipe railing along this stretch of trail... and the railing promptly gave way, depositing him on a small just-less-than-vertical spot 50-60' below the trail, perched a few inches above the remaining 750' or so drop down to McCord Creek. The couple quickly took their clothes off to construct a makeshift rope. It was a few feet too short, so the woman tried lowering her husband on the rope to reach the guy. Still too short. Then they searched around and found a ~20' stretch of wire in the bushes, lowered the husband again, and had him stretch the wire to the rapidly-tiring friend. That was finally enough length, and they gingerly made their way back up to the trail. The article concludes:
Secor [the friend] was given first aid at the Eagle Creek ranger station. The rope could not be photographed Tuesday night. Mr. and Mrs. Short had put it back on.
If I had to pick one object to have on hand for an outdoor emergency, I'd still probably choose a mobile phone with bars, but if that isn't available it's hard to go wrong with some quality 1940s tailoring, I guess. Also, do NOT lean your weight on that pipe, or really any pipe that you didn't personally install.
The other thing that occurs to me -- and I have no idea how to turn this into useful general-purpose advice -- is that if enough people had done like that 1942 letter proposed, and scoured the McCord Creek area for scrap metal, there might not have been a random 20' length of wire just lying in a bush nearby, and the whole rescue might have come up short in that case. And there's just no way people in 1942 could have known or planned ahead for any of this. It's just one of those spooky details, I guess.
- July 1952 article reminding readers that taking kids out to the Gorge is a great summer activity. The described route sounds the same as it was after 1935, but that would change in the next few years as the road was transformed piece by piece into a modern interstate freeway.
- In 1959, Elowah Falls was obscure enough to figure in an Oregon geography quiz in Dick Fagan's long-running "Mill Ends" column. You know, the column the tiny park with the leprechauns is named for.
1960: Narrow escape for a tugboat crewman just off the mouth of McCord Creek when the boat capsized while it and two other tugs were repositioning a dredging ship. Not really related to anything else in the story, but the newspapers were pretty light on Elowah Falls news in the 1950s and 1960s. In other news on the same page, a Troutdale foundryman was declared the victor of the town's annual smelt-eating contest, after gobbling 122(!) of the greasy little fish during the two-hour contest.
And before you get the idea that 1960 was a sweet and innocent time in Oregon, the main story on the page concerned the state Eugenics Commission, which had just refused an unnamed woman's request to have her tubes tied due to not wanting any more children, and being unable to afford the procedure. They turned her down, stating they only acted to "protect society from those who are mentally ill or defective", and by law had no official interest in people's economic conditions. The article notes that a month earlier, Governor Hatfield had angrily denied accusations that he favored sterilizing "unwed mothers". The article tentatively suggests that just maybe it might be a good idea in some cases, strictly on a voluntary basis, given the high cost to society of "illegitimate children". And today, over six decades later, one of the two major political parties in the US is still trying to drag us back to those days. But I'm digressing, and you didn't come here to read about politics, and the more I write about politics the more stressed and unhappy it makes me.
- Mentioned in a 1964 article on driving the Gorge-Mt. Hood loop. It calls the falls "McCord Creek Falls", which was common for a while. Around the same time people started using "Tanner Creek Falls" instead of "Wahclella Falls", and "Moffett Falls" or "Moffett Creek Falls" instead of "Wahe Falls", and in general the use of romanticized Indian and pseudo-Indian place names assigned by white people just sort of fell out of favor for a while, but somehow not in a way that was of any benefit to native people.
- March 1975 article is a tale about what exploring the Gorge was like before the internet. The author glimpsed Elowah Falls from the freeway a few times, and finally she and her husband went looking for it, finally running across the modest trailhead at Yeon State Park. The signage at the time mostly talked about Beacon Rock across the river, and the doings of Lewis and Clark and the Oregon Trail pioneers, and not so much about the trails that started here or where they went, so the couple went into the trip not knowing what to expect. Sounds like they were rather bowled over by the experience. Which is about what it was like when I went there the first time, circa 1990.
- A letter to the editor in response reminds everyone that the lower falls are called "Elowah Falls", not "McCord Creek Falls", despite what you might think going by what the other falls are called. It would have been so easy to avoid this naming mess almost exactly 60 years earlier, but no....
- A July 1977 article describes the trail without all the pre-internet research difficulties, and grumbles about people picking all the wildflowers (which is kind of an anachronism too). Like the 1975 article, it notes that the trail to Elowah Falls ended at the creek at that time. At one point it mentions the iron railing on the way to the upper falls, which (she says) is there for you to lean against. Please recall the 1945 incident I mentioned earlier and note that this railing is now close to 90 years old at this point and substantial parts of it may be original, and any extended warranties the state may have bought on it have long since expired, and it just flat-out looks sketchy, and even if it's in perfect condition, recall that the average hikers of 1935 (and, frankly, 1977) were, um, a bit more svelte than their present-day counterparts. I am not pointing fingers at you, personally, of course, or at myself for that matter; I'm just saying that the combined weight of either of us, or both of us, along with that one mysterious stranger up ahead who's also leaning on the same pipe while gobbling donuts from a box, taken as a whole, may verge on exceeding certain engineering tolerances.
- The upper falls figured in several Roberta Lowe columns in the Oregon Journal over 1981-82. The paper was in the throes of going out of business just then, which might have emboldened her in adding some of the more advanced details in her hike ideas.
- April 1981 column inserts the Elowah Falls trail and Upper McCord side trip into a longer route covering a chunk of the shiny new Trail 400. Starting at the McLoughlin State Park trailhead, heading east thru the McCord Creek area and then continuing on to Tanner Creek and our waiting car shuttle. The whole stretch west of McCord Creek was abandoned after the 1996 floods so this exact route is not currently possible. I've heard that this stretch of trail was not really very scenic anyway. Further east, she casually mentions that a certain unmarked side trail is the start of the unmaintained, highly unofficial, and highly scenic Munra Point Trail
Other column came in June 1982, and really swings for the fences with another unusual route. As in, first you hike the nice trail for normies that gets you to the upper falls. Then you cross the creek and start an uphill scramble/bushwhack for about a mile, gaining 1100 vertical feet in the process, while your boring friends chill at the picnic table that used to exist down at the upper falls. If you do it correctly you end up at little-visited Wauneka Point, home to panoramic views and a large collection of native rockworks, similar to those found in a few other places around the Gorge. The official Field Guide route is longer and easier and generally follows established trails (albeit for small values of "established" in some cases), and that page mentions the existence of the Lowe route and points at at least one trip report that followed it. But they say it's only suitable for the very experienced hikers of the present day. But that's the route that was once published in a family newspaper. One may feel more empowered to do this when a.) you're an established journalist writing for an established newspaper, and b.) said newspaper is on the brink of going out of business in a few months so it's not like there's any money in suing you if somebody gets hurt. At one point she even suggested leaning out over the railing on the upper falls trail to get a better view.
In passing, the article points out where to find the equally unofficial Nesmith Ridge Trail, which goes the same place as the official Nesmith Point Trail, but starts at the upper falls and is generally considered a better and more scenic route. She had actually covered this route more extensively a month earlier, framing it as the next logical step after reviving a number of other vintage trails from the golden days of yore. I missed this article at first because she -- correctly -- called the falls "Upper Elowah Falls".
You'll also see boot paths here that just sort of follow McCord Creek further upstream. As far as anybody knows there's nothing interesting to see up that way. No waterfalls on LIDAR, no viewpoints, nothing historical or archeological to look for, just a little mountain stream burbling along thru the forest.
A third Lowe column from the same time period bypasses both waterfalls, and instead informs us that the long-abandoned Moffett Creek Trail had just been repaired and reopened, and she was ready with a guide to this rustic backcountry trail. The name suggests it's a trail up along Moffett Creek, something that was proposed back in the mid-1910s but never built due to the high estimated cost of labor and dynamite. Instead, it branches off the nearly-as-remote Tanner Creek trail (which starts near the far end of Tanner Creek Road / Forest Road 777) and switchbacks up and down to cross the upper reaches of the Tanner, Moffett, and McCord Creek watersheds, passing through some Bull Run infrastructure just outside the closure boundary along the way. I have never even cast eyes on this trail, much less hiked any distance on it. Anyway, Lowe cheerfully explains the sights along the way and offers tips on safely fording the various creeks you'll encounter, getting you as far as the top of the Nesmith Point Trail, the return leg for your car shuttle loop. The description of that last part is pretty much a handwave; maybe it was edited for length, or she just assumed everyone knows that part already. Either way, after completing the hike as described you'd still need to drive up sketchy Road 777 again to pick up your other car. Except that it's been gated and closed to the general public since the late 90s, due to being a Forest Service road that was too easily accessed by people who don't know what Forest Service roads are like.
I am slightly tempted to feed these and other Lowe articles into the latest GPT-style AI and have it generate an endlessly cheerful practical guide to taking the One Ring to Mordor, explaining how the ring may chafe a bit and become heavier as Mordor approaches, but the usual first aid for blisters ought to do the trick. But I digress again.
- A 1986 list of tallest waterfalls in Oregon, sorted by height, accompanying an article on waterfall geology. This was back when the local newspaper of record had a regular geology columnist, which they did for a number of years after the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens.
- January 1994: Terry Richard column naming the Elowah + Upper McCord twofer the Hike of the Week.
- Sometime after that, the bike-centric HCRH State Trail project reached McCord Creek, and the state added a paved trail between the existing Yeon trailhead and Cascade Locks. I don't recall whether it all opened at once or in phases, but it was the first new trail option here since the 400. The HCRH trail and the 400 intersect repeatedly on their sorta-parallel paths through the Gorge, creating new ways to turn out-n-back hikes into loops. The HCRH trail is nobody's idea of a pristine wilderness experience, and to me the main reason you might want to use it would be to shorten the return leg, in case a storm system moves in or that knee you hurt back in 2013 starts twinging again, or you're being pursued by Mafia goons from out of town who don't know there's a back way back to your car now.
- April 2016 article suggests spending Spring Break week visiting as many Gorge waterfalls as possible. There was a time not so long ago when you could do this and come away thinking you'd done all the major attractions. But now you'll come to realize you've barely scratched the surface of what's out there. The upper and lower falls get a shout out because they're an easy twofer if you're going for sheer numbers.
- Of course the Eagle Creek Fire happened the very next summer, and the area was closed for several years afterward. During that time the only glimpses we got of the area were some aerial photos taken by the state for damage assessment. A Wy'east Blog post on the Gorge after the 2017 fire includes a bunch of these photos and tries to make sense of what had changed.
- A May 2019 article similar to the 2016 "see every waterfall" challenge, but not limited to the Gorge this time for obvious reasons.
- January 2021 OregonHikers forum post about a recent visit, by someone who had volunteered with the post-fire restoration work. He explains the restoration work included repairing a lot of long-neglected CCC stonework, including a long-closed viewpoint that gives a higher-elevation view of the lower falls.
