Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

North Cascades Travelog #14
Okanogan National Forest, WA - Mon, 4 Sep 2023, 12pm.

I didn't expect this one trail hike to stretch to 3 blogs especially because it's not even that long, but here we are. There's just been so much beauty to share.



After we reached near the top of the Falls Creek trail and had seen several waterfalls on the way up (previous blog) we turned around to go back down. As hard as the steep uphill stretches were on the way up, we ate up the distance quickly on the descent. It seemed like we were back down to flatland in 5 minutes. (I think it was actually 15 minutes.)



Before going all the way out to the trailhead, though, we stopped back at the first falls. On the way past them the first time we'd noticed a perch we could scramble up to to be right next to the falls. We skipped that on the way up, figuring we'd hit it on the way back after seeing everything else. Plus, the scramble up to it was really steep. Well, after seeing how steep the rest of the trail was, we were like, pfft, let's just do it.

It was fun to stand up next to the falls. The wind wasn't blowing, so spray wasn't much of a problem. The sun dodging behind clouds was a problem, though. It was dim. But as I noted a few blogs ago, dim light is something of a secret boon to waterfalls photography. Not only I was able to get lots of motion-blur photos of the water using my neutral density filter but the scene took on an eerie color cast. On the downside I hadn't carried my tripod on this hike, so I had to capture these slow exposures free-hand, relying on the camera lens's image stabilization system to avert excessive blurring from camera motion. Not all the shots I took are keepers (I shot a lot) but I'm happy overall with the results.

North Cascades Travelog #12
Okanogan National Forest, WA - Mon, 4 Sep 2023, 9:45am.

This morning we got up early-ish— it's technically a weekday even though it's a holiday, so my standard alarm wakes me up at 6:45am— puttered around the hotel room for a bit, ate a light breakfast, pulled our packs together, and headed out for a morning hike. Our hike this morning is the Falls Creek Falls Trail. It's about 12 miles north of Winthrop in the Okanogan National Forest.



Curiously today marked the second time we've been at this trailhead. We were here yesterday, too! As I noted in my Day 2 wrap-up last night, when we got here late in the afternoon it was getting dark with clouds in the sky and had just started to sprinkle rain. Plus, we were really achy from other hikes earlier in the day. "It's only a half mile trail, maybe we should do it anyway," we told ourselves. We decided the poor conditions meant we should try again today. And since it's only about a 20 minute drive from town it's not like it's a lot of extra time spent getting there and back.

Though the trail does start out easy— in the photo above you can see it's paved and is marked as handicap accessible— I'm really glad we chose to bail out the first time and come back today. We're feeling so much more refreshed, and the weather is beautiful.



That paved trail in the first pic leads gently upwards through an old growth forest to Falls Creek Falls... or at least the first part(s) of Falls Creek Falls. Yes, the first part(s), because as beautiful as these falls are— and we spent a while drinking in their beauty— there's more to see further up the trail.

This spot is where the sidewalk ends, though. The trail turns to dirt and climbs steeply from here.



Zig-zagging up the switchbacks from the first falls took some huffing and puffing but it was a nice part of the hike. As we climbed out of the valley up the side of the hill we passed through a burn zone— as you can see in the photo above. A wildfire is burning right now in the high mountains to the west of here. This area burned maybe 3 years ago, I read. The charred hulks of the big trees remain, some of them barely clinging to a bit of life, while new undergrowth is already starting to thrive.

Stay tuned; there's more to come!

North Cascades Travelog #9
Mazama, WA - Sun, 3 Sep 2023, 2pm.

On Sunday we made hiking the Cedar Creek Falls trail our main event for the day. The hike up the trail was about 2 miles of walking with 500-600' of elevation gain, leading to a lovely set of waterfalls.



In my previous blog (link above) I shared a photo of the first falls we saw. Moments later I discovered it's Middle Falls, as there are falls both above and below it. But before that, as I was stepping around on rocky perches overlooking the scene, I discovered that from a different angle Middle Falls actually has two chutes of water (photo above).

After rest at this vantage point for a few minutes I scrambled down to the rocks near the top of the falls. The view downstream was poor from there (I couldn't see much looking don) but the view upstream was beautiful. That's where I saw the upper falls.



The upper falls don't include a large drop like the middle falls, which I estimate to be 40' tall. The biggest drop in this cascade looks to be at most 10' tall. But the series of small falls form a pretty cascade. And the pool at the foot of the cascade is a nice swimming hole. A fellow hiker was enjoying wading around in it.

I might have joined for a swim except (a) I didn't bring a change of clothes and (b) the water was too cold. I learned (b) when I slipped on a wet rock snapping photos like the one above and got wet up to my knees and soaked my boots. Maybe I should have brought that change of clothes. 🤣



Having seen the middle falls from atop a rocky perch and the upper falls from up close and personal (and wet) I scouted routes to see if I could get to the bottom of the middle falls. I found a steep trail with a forbidding looking 10' drop down some exposed boulders. As I looked at it more I realized it only looked forbidding and was totally within my ability to do. I headed down the rocks.

Hawk stayed at the top while I headed below. The rocks were easy enough for me to navigate because with longer arms and legs I could brace with hands and feet and lower myself down safely. Hawk doesn't have as long limbs so it would be tougher for her, and she wanted to avoid risk of twisting her back.



The steep dirt parts of the informal trail actually presented more chances of slipping than those sharp rocks. I made it down without a slip by being careful and using my hiking pole for added support. That's literally why I carry it! At the bottom of the middle falls I enjoyed a great view of the two chutes.

From the floor of this part of the canyon I could look over the lower tier of the falls. Wow, they are big! But no way down from here, and the view peering over the precipice isn't great... unless you like vertigo. 😅 Instead I came back up out of the canyon, rejoined Hawk, and together we went looking for a perch from which to see the lower falls.



Finding such a perch wasn't hard. There are "use trails" all around the area; little unofficial footpaths created by all the people who visited before us. We both enjoyed views of the lower falls, over 80' tall, from a perch up on the canyon wall.

Could we have gotten to the bottom of these falls? I will say "yes, we could..." because another hiker there at the same time did so. But she scrambled down a ravine where the trail was at about 60°. That was way too much of a falling risk for Hawk and too much even for me (the hiker who went down was very young and spry) so we stayed up here and appreciated them from above.

During our time at these various falls the sky turned from partly blue to all gray. A bit of it was smoke hanging in the sky from the fires burning in the high mountains to the west; but most of it was thicker clouds moving in.

Photographic Aside

While gray skies are kind of a bummer for enjoying the great outdoors, they're a bit of a secret boon to photographers. It's easier to balance areas of light and shadow when the light is dimmer. That's because a camera can't capture as much of a range of brightness as the human eye can appreciate.

When you're looking around in nature, your irises can widen or narrow your pupils to adjust for an enormous range of brightness. A camera's iris gets one setting to capture a picture. In addition there are limits to the range of brightness the digital image can represent. In bright sun things like water tend to get "blown out" to full white when you set the exposure to see what's in shaded areas. Set the exposure for the water, and the shaded areas are murky black. Under grayer light, though, the light and dark areas are closer in brightness value so it's easier to capture them both visually in a single picture.

Three-fer, Four-fer?

After a while we decided to head back down the trail. The gray clouds mounting overhead suggested that it could rain soon. Not wanting to get caught on the mountain trail in the rain was one reason to head back down. But an even bigger reason was we actually have two more trails on our list we'd like to hike today. Those will make it a three-fer— or even a four-fer if you count our car-touring in the Washington Pass this morning.

Stay tuned to see what we see next!

North Cascades Travelog #6
Winthrop, WA - Sun, 3 Sep 2023, 9am.

I remarked in my previous blog that this trip to Eastern Washington and the North Cascades is revenge, revenge for things we were not able to do in years past because of car trouble or poor weather. Well, where once poor weather kept us from appreciating Palouse Falls more fully, this year it was the government. All the trails down into the canyon are closed now because some dumbasses fell off the cliffs. Partly the closure is to protect other dumbasses from falling to their deaths— not that dumbasses actually pay attention to warning signs anyway— and partly it's because the local governments are fighting about whose budget has to be used to go and haul their bodies out. So that's why the other 99.9% of us can't have nice things.

Ah, but Palouse Falls was only the minor (thwarted) act of revenge travel this trip. The main part of the revenge was North Cascades National Park, where we cut our trip short six years ago when our car broke down. Now we'd come back for a few days and hike all those trails we were cheated out of hiking before! Except Mother Nature was ready for us. That bitch.

This morning we opened our guide books and websites to recheck the places we'd go hiking today and tomorrow. Whoops, there is a fire in North Cascades. Almost all the trails we wanted to hike are currently closed.

We made specific plans for this trip 6 weeks ago. That was relatively recent by vacation plans making standards! Everything was all clear then. This fire only started within the past few weeks.

I don't think the trails are literally on fire right now; I think the fires are mostly out, but things are closed until crews can make sure. And then there will need to be checks to make sure that everything's safe. You wouldn't want some dumbass shaking a dead tree and dying when it falls on their dumb ass. I mean, whose budget would even pay to haul their dumb ass corpse out of the woods?

Whew. I am now done with blogging about the epic waterfalls hiking day we had a week ago Monday (July 3). Seven different falls, seven different trails, and it only took a week to catch up. Though I did say a week ago that it'd take me a week to finish. 😅 The falls were:

1. Susan Creek Falls
2. Fall Creek Falls
3. Toketee Falls (and carwash!)
4. Watson Falls
5. Whitehorse Falls
6. Clearwater Falls
7. Warm Springs Falls

There were additions and subtractions to this list as we went. Originally I started with #1-4, 7, and Lemolo Falls on my to-do list. After #4, Toketee Falls, we realized we likely would not have the stamina to do everything. We added on #5-6, a pair of very easy walks, after chatting with some fellow travelers.

With Warm Springs and Lemolo left on the list for last, we chose to hike Warm Springs Falls first because it was the easier of the two. Its 0.6 mile round trip distance and lack of significant climbing meant we were sure we both could do it at the end of the day. The Lemolo Falls Trail was 2 miles round trip with an ascent of almost 1,000 feet on the return. By late in the day Hawk was not in condition to do that. I thought I might be.... But even if I were, I calculated that hiking a trail that long would have us arriving at our hotel in Portland (we drove 419 miles in addition to hiking 7 trails!) close to 1am. Thus I decided bailing out on Lemolo Falls was the right thing to do.

By Tuesday morning it was clear skipping Lemolo falls was absolutely the right thing to do. One of my feet was badly sore with a blister. I am sad that I missed Lemolo Falls... though missing it is only for now. It goes on the list to hike on our next trip in that area!

Is Video Easier than Stills?

Last week Monday wasn't even our only day of hiking an epic seven waterfalls. We hiked eight falls the Saturday before it! And I didn't get backlogged on writing about those. What gives?!

Well, two big things were different. First, those eight falls were on one epic trail, the Trail of Ten Falls. Second, I recorded video at most of the falls. I then spliced together 10 or so short clips into a 2m 40s video. That turned out to be easier than processing photos and writing about them. With Tuesday's seven falls I forgot about doing video.

Seeing now how the efforts compare I will endeavor to make video more often on my hiking trips.

Whew, it's now over a week since our epic hiking day on Monday, July 3. We ultimately visited 7 different waterfalls along the North Umpqua River watershed. My plan had been for 8— well, my plan had been for 6, then we added two easy ones mid-afternoon knowing that either or both of the last two longer ones might fall off the plan as we get near the end of our energy (and time, too).

Hike number 6 was Clearwater Falls. Along with Whitehorse Falls it's one of the short ones we added late in the day. From the quiet parking lot it was a level walk of less than 100 meters to a wooden viewing platform with benches.



The Clearwater River gets its name from the exceptional clarity of its water. It bubbles up from springs about a mile upstream from this falls. The water in those springs flows through multiple layers of dried lava (laid down like layers on a layer cake by successive eruptions further up the mountain) that filter it out quiet well. They also keep it at a consistent flow across the year despite the otherwise heavy spring melt cycle followed by summer and fall drought.

Maybe it's the gentle, consistent flow of the water, but this area is popular with mosquitos. They hadn't been a factor on other trails today, but here I was slapping them two and even three at a time. Maybe it's the elevation over 4,000' where they've just hatched for the summer. At least these young'uns are easy to swat. They're like, "Hey, mom, look, I can fly! Buzz, buzz!" Then *splat* with my hand.



While Hawk waited down at the viewing platform, not able to walk further than that (she was still recovering from a muscle tear 2 weeks earlier), I scrambled up a short but steep path along the side of the falls, swatting mosquitoes the whole time. There were nice views from right next to the falls, shown above. I also picked my way out atop the falls and got Hawk's attention to take a picture. I'll have to get a copy of that one from her.

It was interesting doing some people-watching while we were hiking on Monday in the Oregon Cascades. ...Not that were people-watching, per se; it was more like us merely noting whom we shared the trails with. Especially because one pair of hikers, a couple of middle-aged women, were on 3 of the 4 trails we hiked.

I chatted them up as we were ascending the trail to Watson Falls together. "Hey, we've seen you at 3 of the 4 trails we've hiked so far. Where else are you hiking today?"

"Actually we've seen you at all four," one of them kindly corrected me. "We saw you in the parking lot at Toketee Falls."

I guess I was too busy laughing while taking video of the Toketee Car Wash— or taking pictures of the butterfly that Hawk coaxed on her finger— to have noticed them.

It was easy to spot them at the first two falls trails because those trails were so un-busy. Susan Creek Falls we had to ourselves when we started, and they and maybe one other small group arrived after us. At Fall Creek Falls they also started just after us, and then 3-4 more cars of people arrived.

Toketee falls had, like, 10x the number of visitors. That's part of why I didn't spot the two gals in the crowd. Though I did notice right away that Toketee Falls had a very diverse set of visitors. ...Actually it wasn't diverse; it was 80% South Asian. Whereas the first two hikes were almost exclusively White Caucasian, at Toketee Whites were a distinct minority. I wonder if a cultural association had an event at one of the lodges nearby.

At Watson Falls the hiker community skewed White again. That was primarily because there were several truckloads of wilderness firefighters on R&R there. The fire crews were mostly White and mostly male. We thanked them for their service.

The two gals I mentioned above did share some hints on where they were going next. I reconsidered right as soon as I asked them about their plans that I might seem creeper-ish by doing so... though at the same time I figured that given they've seen me on 4 hikes in one day, I'm almost certainly truly about the hikes and not about hitting on women.

Anyway, they mentioned one hike by name that seemed a bit out of our way. At the end of the day they were heading south and we were going north. But they also noted that there were a few drive-to falls nearby that they'd be visiting next because they were about done with hiking. That made me reconsider my plans for the day as I could tell I was getting close to being done with hiking, too. Once back at the car we pulled out Smedley and found two nice-looking falls with minimal hiking required.

After our treks at Susan Creek Falls and Fall Creek Falls Monday morning, plus over 100 miles of driving, it was getting to be time for lunch. We found a little gas station convenience store perfectly located in Steamboat, about a dozen miles before Toketee Falls, our next hiking spot. While there I learned that I was pronouncing Toketee wrong. It's not "toe-KEE-tee" but "TOKE-uh-tee". It's a Chinook word meaning pretty or graceful.

So, do the falls live up to the name? It was a short hike, less than 0.5 mile each way, to find out.



Pretty? Hell yeah. But graceful? More like thunderous. There is a lot of water coming over these falls. And this is only, like, half the flow (see below).

The falls feature a 30' drop in two steps in the upper part of the gorge then a drop of 80' into the wide pool at the bottom. The water cuts through a chasm in columnar basalt rock. We saw some of that over at Fall Creek Canyon, too.

I mentioned that this is only half the flow. Where's the other half? Would you believe... an unintentional carwash?



At the trailhead parking area there is a huge diversion pipe. It's 12' diameter (in my voice-over narration I estimated 10') and made of wood. It's got a lot of leaks going. People were taking turns driving through the sprays as a free carwash.

This pipe is a penstock, diverting water from Toketee Lake just upstream to a hydroelectric power plant further downstream. Only a 1,500' length of the wooden pipe, built in 1949, remains. The rest has been replaced with a concrete tube.

I forgot to mention on the way to hiking Susan Falls on Monday we stopped to fill gas in our car. As an American that's normally a non-event, a basic thing of life I've been doing since before age 16. Except this was in Oregon. It's one of the two states in the US that ban self-serve gas. A 1951 law cites the reasons as youth employment and life-threatening dangers. Yes, it cites those two arguments in consecutive sentences. Pumping gas is so dangerous, let's make kids do it for menial wages! 🙄

...Actually Oregon only partly bans self-serve gas. Diesel has always been self-serve, and starting several years ago Oregon amended its laws to allow self service for gasoline in rural counties. When we stopped at a Shell station umpteen miles outside Roseburg I thought we were in one of those rural areas. Drivers of a few other vehicles at the pumps were operating the pumps themselves, and no staff were on hand to pump the gas for us. I started up the pump as Hawk went inside to buy a snack.

Hawk came back out and told me the the cashier inside was aghast that we started pumping our gas. It turns out we were not in a self-serve area. "OMG, do you need any help with that??" the cashier asked, belatedly.

"No, we're from California," Hawk said.

What Hawk should have said was, "No, we're from the 48½ states in the US where this is normal."

In my previous blog I wrote about hiking to Kentucky Falls in the coastal mountains west of Eugene, Oregon. I remarked that if all I did was get to Kentucky Falls and turn around, it would've been a decent hike. But I didn't turn around there. I went over a mile further (and several hundred vertical feet lower) to reach more falls.



Kentucky Creek plunges over a falls even more dramatic than the first one on the trail. This is Lower Kentucky Falls. There's a nice wooden viewing platform here. Some younger people scrambled up the slippery rocks to the pool below the lowest tier of the falls. You can see one of them in the photo above.

If you "zoom out" on the view from the wooden platform you see something else, too....



There's another fairly tall falls right next to Lower Kentucky Falls. The one on the left is Smith Creek Falls. The two creek plunge over the same rocky ledge then merge together just below it.

While I didn't feel like joining the younger adults scrambling up to the base of Lower Kentucky Falls, I did decide to scramble downstream to the confluence of the two creeks and then up to the base of Smith Creek Falls.

My inspiration for doing this was two-fold. First, I remembered some of the waterfalls in Oahu (Hawaii) we visited last year, where the trail basically disappeared the last 100 meters of the way and we had to boulder-bash our way up the creek. This was no worse than that. Second, as I started downstream to judge if it was worth continuing, my sunglasses slipped off and fell down an 8' tall drop. They landed atop a rock, so they weren't lost in the water. But at that point I figured, "In for a penny, in for a pound," and decided to go the whole way.



I picked my way carefully and found plenty of rocks and logs in the creeks to make my way down to the confluence and up the other creek to the base of Smith Creek Falls, without getting my feet wet. "Will it be worth the effort?" I wondered as I started. When I got to the point where I took the photo above, it totally was. ...Okay, recovering my sunglasses was worth the effort. I hate having to buy new sunglasses. The views were gravy.

In beauty I walk.