Sunday, November 17 ... part 1 ...

Sunday I slept in a bit, about 9-ish, which is late for me on a weekend cuz I usually enjoy getting up early if it's not a work day (ha ha), get up at 7 and have the house to myself, spend a lingering morning reading the paper, drinking coffee, just hanging out in the early hours, as it were. 

But I slept in, and so spent not quite a rushed morning lingering, but still a nice time.  I debated taking another shot at fixing the rear window in the Travelall but figured, what the heck, it is my birthday after all.  So I just lingered. 

Actually I ended up going outside for a bit (it was overcast in places but not raining; in fact it cleared more and more as the day went on) and working on Claudia’s greenhouse.  There were a couple of roof panels that were loose, flapping around a bit when it got really windy, and a little bit of water was leaking in.  So I fixed that, it took all of six screws and ten minutes.

My dad came over about noon-ish and being the day was looking pretty nice, we all (Claudia, my dad, and me; Nell was feeling a bit blasted from the play still so she stayed home) decided to make sort of a day of things and drive out to Multnomah Falls.  I haven’t been out there for a long time, over a year I think, and Claudia had never been so this seemed like a very good idea. 

And it was; it’s only about a half-hour drive from our house, although this time it took a bit longer because I missed the exit to Hwy 84 from I-205 and didn’t realize it until I saw the signs that said “Welcome to Washington.”  Oops.

Anyway, we did make it there, taking the old Columbia River Highway for the last few miles, and the scenery was, in a word, lovely.  In case you haven’t read the liner notes, here’s the skinny on the Falls courtesy the State of Oregon website:

Multnomah Falls is the second highest year-round waterfall in the nation. The water of the Falls drops 620 feet from its origin on Larch Mountain.

[My note:  There seems to be some controversy as to the ranking of Multnomah Falls in terms of height; that is, there is general agreement as to the height of the falls (540+ for the upper falls, 60+ for the lower falls), but as for “Second Highest Year-Round Falls in the US,” that’s up for debate – it depends how you calculate height, plus what you mean by “year-round,” and all that technical stuff.  Regardless, the falls are awesome.]

Unusually cold weather can turns this plummeting falls into a frozen icicle, with a few drops falling from the bottom. The frozen Falls are a sight to behold.

It wasn’t freezing, as you can probably guess from this picture.  This was taken from near where we parked, walking through the parking lot as we moved towards the lodge.  As a First Thing You See, it’s pretty nice.

The falls in all their glory.  This is actually two shots that I merged, digitally, using a cool piece of software called “The Panorama Factory.”  Even from a distance, the falls are way too big to fit into one frame of the camera (unless you’ve got a really wide angle lens), so I was only able to get from the top of the falls to just below the bridge, in once picture, and then from the bridge to the lower falls in another.  Then I “morphed” them together into one semi-seamless picture.  Not bad for a relatively inexpensive digital camera and shareware software!

Anyway, as for how the falls came to be in the first place ...

Many years ago, a terrible sickness came over the village of the Multnomah people and many died. An old medicine man of the tribe told the chief of the Multnomahs that a pure and innocent maiden must go to a high cliff above the Big River and throw herself on the rocks below and the sickness would leave at once. The chief did not want to ask any maiden to make the sacrifice. But when the chief's daughter saw the sickness on the face of her lover, she went to the high cliff and threw herself on the rocks below and the sickness went away. As a token of the maiden's welcome by the Great Spirit, a stream of water, silvery white, streamed over the cliff and broke into a floating mist along the face of the cliff. Even today, as you carefully watch, the maiden's face can be seen in the upper waterfall as the breeze gently rustles the watery strands of her silken hair.

There was your basic crowd of tourists there; I’m pretty sure I read a sign that said something like “The falls are the most popular tourist destination in Oregon, and get over 2,000,000 visitors every year,” which is either totally amazing or evidence that I was hallucinating due to too much or too little coffee and I imagined the sign.  In any case, it’s definitely a very popular place to go.

Back in 1995, a big piece of the falls actually fell off – a 400 ton section of the cliff wall came loose somehow (probably due to the cyclical freezing and thawing of the falls, you know, cracks that fill with water and then freeze, expand, melt, lather, rinse, repeat over several hundred thousand years) and fell into the plunge pool (that’s the pool at the base of the top falls), injuring thirteen people.  Fortunately, I wasn’t one of them, but I remember back in the early 80’s, my friend Layne and I stopped at the falls on the way back home (at that time) to Kennewick, WA from Portland, and I have a picture somewhere of Layne frolicking about in the plunge pool.  It’s all closed off now, of course, as it’s way too dangerous to go there nowadays and was probably way too dangerous back then as well, but you know how kids will be kids …

This picture is my artsy-fartsy attempt at capturing the mystic mood of the falls, with the rock and the water and the plants and the moss and the semi-out-of-focus ethereal quality that you get when you try to hand-hold a camera with a shutter speed set slower than a fifteenth of a second.  I like it, anyway.

There’s a trail that leads from the base of the falls up to the bridge, then across the bridge and all the way to the top of the falls, so we decided to hike it.  Not all the way to the top, as it was about 3-ish by the time we started and it would have taken us until after dark to get to the top and back (it’s about half a mile from the base of the falls to the lookout point where we stopped, and about another ¾ mile from that point to the top of the falls).  But it was still a very nice hike; the trail is rather steep but paved so it’s not too slippery.  Even though we didn’t climb all that high, we still had some pretty great views of the gorge.

Here’s a shot my dad took of Claudia and me, at our turnaround point.  He walked way ahead of us most of the way up so I don’t have any shots of him.  Or, rather, the shots I have of him tend to be this little red dot, as you may have already noticed.

You can see how pretty a view it was, once you get our heads out of the picture.

You can also see that the sun is getting pretty low on the horizon by this time, around 4-ish.  Thus we made the decision to call it a hike, as it were, and go back down as we wanted to drive back via the scenic route to enjoy said scenery with whatever daylight we had left ...