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.
| 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.
