Wahkeena Falls, Nov 25th

I’m so far behind with this that I’m even thinking of skipping some of the hikes I need to report! I guess I’m hiking too much and don’t have a lot of time to write. I guess that could be seen as a good thing. My original idea for Thanksgiving was to go backpacking somewhere but weather wasn’t looking good so I had to cancel. Looking at the calendar in the group I saw that Brian wanted to do the classic hike from Multnomah Falls to Wahkeena so I decided to join. I usually like this hike counter clockwise as I like how the creek just disappears in front of you when you get close to a waterfall. Brian though about doing it in reverse so we could get the section of the trail that goes next to the road out of the way first and then enjoy the upper section. With that in mind, we parked at the Wahkeena trail head and took the connector trail to Multnomah. This first portion gave us a quick glimpse of what would be ahead, ice and icicles! It felt a bit strange when we got to Multnomah that there weren’t many cars. Then we noticed that the restaurant and lodge were closed, the store was closed and even the little coffee shop outside was close. We found a couple of trail runners coming down that told us the gate on the trail was also closed which was a bit of a bummer. Although there was no indication of it, we assumed it was because of the holidays and the ice on the trail. In a map in Multnomah, we saw there was another trail further down the road that would connect to the main trail so we went out trying to find it (walking on the historic highway). Well,, we didn’t find that trail so we turned back and as we passed Multnomah, we went to check the map again and saw the little letters on the bottom that said “Map not to scale”… I guess we deserved that. After all that process, we hiked back to the Wahkeena trailhead and started from there. As expected, the scenery was beautiful with frozen waterfalls and icicles. The hike was much shorter than our original plan but still we made it to the Wahkeena springs and had the mountain to ourselves. On the way back though, we had another eerie moment when we got in the cars and started driving back to town. As we were driving, we noticed there weren’t many cars on the highway, in fact, there were none. Then we saw, a couple of miles down the road that they were shutting the highway down due to a weather system coming in. I guess we got lucky and were able to get back home safely. Lesson learned, look for small letters at the bottom of maps!



You can check the pictures here