Monday, July 28th - Columbia Gorge Hikes (part 1)

I know, I know. We suck. The good news is that we have been walking (almost) every week, but it’s mostly been neighborhood walks, the Fanno Creek trail….stuff we’ve done before that isn’t very exciting to write about. With all our girls off at camp this week, though, we decided to take on a couple of the Gorge walks from the much hated ‘Easy Day Hikes’ book. I think we’re down to just one or two local walks from that stupid book and the rest are way out – like 50+ miles, which seems a little excessive for a book titled “Easy Day Hikes: Portland, Oregon”.  My vote is that anything over 50 miles loses its easy day hike status.  Driving 75 miles to make a 3 mile loop around Lost Lake just doesn’t seem worth it.

Okay, sorry, I’m putting the soap box back under the desk now. As I started to say, on Monday we headed out to cross off two Gorge walks, the Elowah Falls/Upper McCord Creek trail and the Wahclella Falls trail. Elowah was closer so we decided to do that first. The EDH book instructed us to take I-84 to exit 35 – check – and then turn west toward Hood River at the stop sign. Oookay. Hood River is actually east, but…we tried to follow the extremely vague directions and ended up back on the ramp for I-84. Stupid book!

No problem, though, the Wahclella Falls trailhead was only 5 miles further down the highway, so we decided to do that first and then circle back. This turned out to be somewhat providential, as this is a beautiful, gorgeous, stunning, magnificent - you get the idea - walk. The path runs along beside my favorite kind of babbling creek, so all you can hear is the water tumbling over the rocks, the birds singing…and me panting for breath, of course. Apparently local walks don’t build up much endurance for hill climbing.

The path goes pretty high up but there was always enough vegetation that I didn’t feel like I’d go tumbling off the path if I looked down. I’m not very good with heights, and narrow trails with no handrails and huge drop-offs freak me out completely.  Not that you’d want to fall off this trail, it is steep, but it didn’t give me the heebie-jeebies like a lot of them do. The trail split after a while and as usual we chose the high road – get the hills out of the way first is our motto!

After a while the path headed back down toward the creek, and we could hear the falls and knew we must be getting close. Then we walked around the corner and…wow. I’m running out of superlatives, so you’re going to have to look at Katje’s pictures to see how lovely the falls are. It’s a huge spill of water that pours out of a narrow passage that it has eroded away over who knows how many years into a deep pool surrounded by mossy rocks...yeah, look at the pictures.

It’s only a little over two miles out, around the loop and back, and in my opinion is one of the prettiest hikes in the Gorge, which is known for its beautiful walks. Just don’t tell anyone about it – let them all go to the extremely crowded Multnomah Falls and leave this gem to those of us in the know.