Considering that I can’t stand the sound of my own voice I sure can run my jaw when I am playing tour guide, and I think I said “If you’ve never seen Columbia Gorge or Multnomah Falls before then this is the right way to do it” at least forty times on the drive out. Considering that the natural features along the Gorge are so striking as to need no introduction I probably could have talked a lot less, but I still maintain there’s a sequence in which this particular stretch of Oregon’s northern border is best experienced.
I know I have a few locals reading along here, so for everyone else, here’s how it’s done: start by hopping on I-84 East, and in twenty minutes or so you’ll forget you started out in a fair sized city. Take the Historic Highway exit, which leads you across the Sandy River and past some picnic grounds and the Tippy Canoe and up and up through the little town of Corbett, and all the green sure is pretty but there’s nothing all that noteworthy until you come up to the first viewpoint, and here’s a thousand words for you:
If you’re lucky (and we were!) there’s not a cloud to be seen and you can look forever in either direction, and of course you can’t help but notice something different about the next cliff over, and I say that it’s our next stop.
Vista House is all done being renovated, and as high up as you are at this point it doesn’t seem like another ten feet worth of altitude can make that much of a difference until you climb up on the observation deck.
Then it’s back on the old highway, down and around till you’re back on the same level as the river again, and Latourell Falls is first up, a quick walk up a trail from the parking lot.
Down the winding road a few more miles there’s another place to park, and here there’s a waterfall with a name I can never remember other than that it starts with a ‘W’, so I’ve taken to calling it Wenatchee Falls, which doesn’t make much sense but this particular day it seems appropriate. There’s a grueling serious of switchbacks taking you straight up the cliff, and finally you’ll walk right across where the water spills down off the top of some rocks, and then keep on going straight up across felled trees and moss covered rocks until you’ve gained something like 800 vertical feet, at which point the path veers away from the falls and across the top of the ridge. You’ll increase your altitude by another hundred feet or so, till there’s only the wind whistling across the top of the ridge, surrounded by trees that a half hour ago had seemed impossibly far away. Few venture this far, and for the most part you’ll have the trail to yourself. Keep along that trail, along the crest, and eventually you’ll come to a clearing and the view will be worth what you’ve done to your legs.
Keep going, and you’ll pass patches of ice and trees that split in half from last winter’s cold, and after a while you’ll realize that noise is too steady and too low to be wind anymore, and it must be water, and you’ll come across a scene far above the waterfall that most people don’t get to see.
Follow the path back down, and other hikers start to become more frequent, as you trace the water down through one waterfall after another.
After a while the stream levels out a bit and eventually you’ll come across scores of people milling about. The trail veers away from the water here, down another series of switchbacks, and at this point you’ve earned the right to grin savagely at the suburbanites lumbering upwards, pausing at the corners to complain about how far it is to get to the top. Try coming around the long way.
The trail near Multnomah Falls really seems designed to be descended rather than ascended, keeping the falls hidden from the new viewer, doling out glimpses here and there, before finally letting you cross a bridge through a fountain of spray, and down and around to the main plaza where most people are just starting their journey. You can stop and take a picture here, knowing full well that it’s almost impossible to do the scene justice.
It’s a breathtaking view no matter what, but I think it is even more so if you can look up and know that you’ve walked down the series of falls above this, that you’ve dipped your hands into the stream at a point far above where anyone down here can see to drink water from freshly melted snow, that you’ve hopped over fallen trees that weren’t there last season and trudged through ankle-deep mud from a landslide — that’s when you can lean back and look up and think I’ve earned this.
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