Oregon - Day 18 - Multnomah Falls, Mt. Hood

Memaloose State Campground, near Hood River

Wednesday, 18 May 2022

today's route

Not many miles after we left Cascade Locks, we passed Bonneville Dam.  My view going west was very different from eastbound the other day.  Today I could see a lot of the dam and the power generation facility that was invisible from the other side of the highway.  I didn't stop, but I think they offer tours.

I lived in Washington too long not to have heard of this dam, but I never knew anything about it, so I looked it up.  Here's the Wikipedia page,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Dam  It was a Depression-era project and the largest dam in the US at the time.  They've done some renovations and additions, but it's still going strong.

And not much farther down the road from that was Multnomah Falls, which I thought I'd seen when I was driving east, but today I stopped at the visitor parking area.  Here's what I saw:

The falls has 2 sections, and this is the upper section.  You can see how misty the view was and, in fact, it was actually raining.  A real shame because we were there so early in the day that almost nobody else was around, and we could've had a nice walk and maybe gotten a better view.  But I just wasn't interested in having all 3 of us getting soaked just to see a waterfall, however spectacular.  Here's what I missed:

An internet photo of the falls.

The combined height of the 2 sections of the falls is 620', which makes it the tallest in Oregon and one of the taller ones in the US.  There're some wonderful photos (including one of the falls when they're frozen) on the Wikipedia page.   https://en.wikipedia.org/Multnomah-Falls

From the falls, we continued west back to Gresham (where I'd gotten lost a few days ago) and turned south.  I wanted to get a view of Mt. Hood and hoped that this drive, which the map said circles all around it, would do that for me.  The lack of visibility of the falls, though, didn't leave me feeling hopeful.

After I left the Portland area behind, the road turned east, running through large wooded areas, and was really pretty.  At one point, road crews stopped all traffic on the 5 lanes of travel, and they proceeded to cut down a tree that stretched across the entire road.  I had plenty of time to watch them, because they cleared the other side much faster than they cleared ours.  But it was raining heavily and I wouldn't have wanted their job.

We drove past/through a lot of small towns: Sandy, Wildwood, Rhododendron (that's a town).  We started seeing elevation signs along the road: elev. 1,500', then elev. 2,000', then elev. 2,500'.  The road kept climbing and I started to see snow beside the road.

At Government Camp, it looked like it had recently snowed, there was so much of it.  That's the name of an actual town, elev. 3,995'.  It sits within 5 miles of Mt. Hood and acts as the ski town and recreation jump-off point for the mountain.

A little farther on we finally got to the top of the road at Barlow Pass Summit, elev. 4,161'.  The pass was on OR-35, designated as Mt. Hood Oregon Scenic Byway.  Visibility was still exceedingly limited, but I could tell that this was indeed a scenic road.  But even when the clouds started to lift, I still couldn't see anything of Mt. Hood, let alone its peak.

I thought I saw it when I drove to Cascade Locks last week, and this internet photo shows a photo of Mt. Hood that looks an awful lot like what I saw then.

Mt. Hood

My view the other day didn't include this much mountain - I saw only about 2/3 of this view, and the snow level was higher up.  Maybe I saw another mountain, but nobody says there's another one this high in this neighborhood, so I think that was it.  Glad I saw it at all but sorry I couldn't see it today.

As a side note, National Geographic has recently ranked Mt. Hood as America's 4th most dangerous volcano, based on likelihood of eruption and amount of damage that would follow.  Its last eruption was in the 1790s, which really wasn't all that long ago in geologic terms.  Mt. Hood, at 11,239', is Oregon's tallest point.

The road crossed the East Fork of Hood River, and I saw a lot of water tumbling down.

As we descended, I started seeing some fairly new leaves on the trees - spring was apparently arriving (it is May, after all).  I passed a large flock of sheep.  And all along the road I saw orchards and vineyards and wineries.  I'd clearly stumbled into some of Oregon's Wine Country.

At the town of Hood River, I stopped at a Safeway to fill in the gaps left by the Cascade Locks grocery.  Tonight's campground was about 9 miles east of there.

This was a pleasant but slightly odd campground.  The entrance is accessible only for westbound traffic, so I had to drive 4 miles farther to the next exit, make a u-turn under the highway and come back again.  And then I had to drive through a highway rest area for the campground.  Weird.

But plenty of space between campsites and plenty of trees.   And because it sits right on the Columbia River, there were also, sadly, plenty of Canada geese.  So there was plenty of goose poop for Dexter to try to grab before I caught him doing it.  Ugh.

And we saw a lot of squirrels, of several different types.  At least, they looked really different from each other.  I finally waved down a park ranger who was patrolling the campground and asked her.  She said there really were several types.  The ones that looked a lot like chipmunks to me she said were ground squirrels and were an invasive species - they didn't belong here and were muscling out others, like gray squirrels, that did belong here.  Dext doesn't have much interest in squirrels since he discovered chipmunks, but these squirrels that were so much like them really caught his attention.  

At least the sun had come out and it was pleasantly warm, so I took the dogs out for several walks.