OREGON
Oregon Road Trip - Day 7
Today we planned to head east out of Portland through the Columbia River Gorge. I think I mentioned before that this was the thesis of this whole roadtrip. I was determined, but also nervous because of how much it rained the night before.
For breakfast, we decided to try a new cafe. This time we went to Coffee Time. Compared to yesterday, this place was much more interesting. It had dim lighting and interesting decor.
We packed up our Airbnb and hit the road. I had a long list of waterfalls to check out but knew we’d probably hit about half of them. In particular I wasn’t in the mood for long hikes.
Here’s the full list of falls then I’ll get into which ones we actually saw
- Bridal Veil Falls
- Wahkeena Falls
- Multnomah Falls
- Oneonta Gorge
- Dry Creek Falls
- Punchbowl Falls
- Horsetail Falls and Ponytail Falls.
- Wahclella Falls Trail
I’m sure there are actually many more but those are the ones I have written down.
First, geographically, was Bridal Veil Falls. Not to be confused with the one in Yosemite! This one was about forty five minutes drive from our place in Portland. There’s a small parking lot but it wasn’t too busy. It’s a 3/4 mile hike round trip.
It looks smaller in the photo than it did in real life. Amazing bang for the buck.
Second up was Wahkeena Falls. I didn’t realize how famous and popular Multnomah Falls are and these two are connected by a half mile trail. There wasn’t parking at Wahkeena so we kept going on the little frontage road alongside 30. My boyfriend saw there was a big parking lot for Multnomah Falls, we just had to backtrack.
So in that way we skipped Wahkeena and Multnomah and decided to hit the next two on our way back to the parking lot.
Oneonta Falls didn’t have a very clear trail map and a very small parking area. The trail was very rocky and uphill. So when we saw our first waterfall on the trail we decided that must be Oneonta Falls, took a picture, and headed back down. On reflection and studying the trail map further, we’re pretty sure we just saw random water falling hah.
If you’re enterprising, this trail does eventually meet up with Ponytail Falls and Horsetail Falls. If we had more time it might’ve been cool to do, I think it’s only a few miles.
For us we took the car onwards. The Oneonta tunnel and viewpoint of the gorge are not much further down the road and we thought it looked cool so we stopped to take pictures.
We parked at Ponytail Falls which you can see from the parking lot.
Horsetail Falls is the bottom portion of Ponytail Falls and is a short hike up to view. You can see on the right hand side that the trail keeps going up to meet up with Oneonta.
And you can walk behind the waterfall!
At this point it was 1 PM and we needed lunch. Luckily for us, the Multnomah Falls parking lot has a lodge. We had seen people walking around with coffee cups when driving past so we intuited there might be a cafe there, and we were right.
I had low expectations for the food but the burger I got was actually really good.
It’s pretty crowded at Multnomah Falls and I believe we saw two different couples having engagement photos taken. The lodge and the bottom of the falls are probably a hundred feet apart. Like the other falls, there was a trail to walk further up to a higher viewpoint.
From the bottom:
From the viewpoint:
You can actually keep going up from this bridge to the very top of the falls. We talked about it but it looked like quite a bit further up! I bet it’s an awesome view but we had an agenda.
We headed back to the lodge and kept walking along the road back toward Wahkeena Falls. There’s a small trail along the road. It’s a little hard to see. Do NOT walk on the road! It’s about half a mile and actually has its own little waterfall.
Wahkeena can actually be seen from the parking lot which I wish I had known at the beginning of the day. We could’ve just snapped a few pictures before continuing on. It was nice not having a big crowd at least.
From the bottom:
From the viewpoint:
We had one last waterfall to behold – Wahclella Falls. It’s a bit further down the gorge by thirty or so minutes. This short hike was a bombshell ending to our adventurous day. The short hike has at least four waterfalls. It follows a ravine with a river at the bottom and is chock full of trees and cool rocks.
I highly recommend this hike! I really did not expect the waterfall at the end. Also in my second picture you can’t see how tall it is, more water is falling from the left side.
At that point our eyeballs were exhausted and had beholden enough amazing sights. We just wanted to get to our hotel in Mitchell in one piece.
It was probably a 3 hour drive to Mitchell. The rest of the gorge is an amazing drive along the river to the Dulles. Then it becomes huge fields of grass as far as the eye can see, and wind turbines. And then out of nowhere you enter the part of Oregon that looks like Arizona or New Mexico.
It also was snowy so I couldn’t admire the surroundings too much. It got pretty twisty on the roads. We drove through Condon and Fossil to get to Mitchell, which is part of a scenic drive for John Day Fossil Bed National Monument.
We got to Mitchell and were exhausted. Thankfully there’s a brewery called Tigertown Brewing that had hot food and beer. It was incredibly good.
Our hotel was thankfully only about 50 feet away. We stayed at the The Oregon Hotel which might not be there if you’re planning to visit since there was a “for sale” sign out front. We got the king sized bedroom with its own bath and I thought it was incredibly charming. Also the bed was godly comfortable. Or maybe we were just worn out.
As we were going to sleep it started snowing in earnest outside.