Falls stitch together drama
What is it about falling water that captures our
imaginations?
The Sierra Nevada is filled with dramatic granite chasms, but
only one offers both easy access and a waterfall at nearly every
turn in the road.
Falls stitch together drama
What is it about falling water that captures our imaginations?
The Sierra Nevada is filled with dramatic granite chasms, but only one offers both easy access and a waterfall at nearly every turn in the road.
It’s falling water that induces many of Yosemite’s 4 million visitors to linger in the valley.
Waterfalls capture a unique mix of beauty, power and music like nothing else.
We’ve walked to falls in the Sierra and the Santa Cruz Mountains. Tropical streams in Hawaii induced us to slide over red dirt trails in search of falling water. A Central American cataract shoots from a bowl of basalt pillars that would embarrass Devil’s Postpile. The falls plummet past ferns and bromeliads sprouting from the rock wall before coming to rest in an aquamarine pool filled with fish. It was definitely worth the arduous walk.
Last week we visited an old friend – Multnomah Falls.
The quick jaunt to Multnomah punctuated a visit with family last week.
Located about 30 minutes east of Portland, Multnomah is the second highest perennial waterfall in the United States, falling 620 feet in two drops.
It’s kind of a Disney attraction for its drive-up convenience. A stone lodge at the edge of the parking lot offers meals, and vendors sell water and snacks at the side of a paved path leading to the falls.
An arched bridge spans the gorge just above the lower falls, completing a picture that appears on countless postcards and posters.
We were there because one of our daughters wanted to see the stuff of legend.
As a young boy, my father lived in the Portland area, and he had visited Multnomah Falls. When I was scarcely more than a toddler, I accompanied him on a scramble over the boulders flanking the upper falls. We walked into a cavern at the base of that curtain of water, and stood behind it, looking out at the forest on the other side.
My daughter was game for a return trip, but a litigious society and zealous park rangers make a walk behind the falls a risky proposition.
While Multnomah may be the marquee falls in the area, the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge counts more than 70 waterfalls.
The heart of the eastern U.S. may beat to the pulse of the Mississippi but the Columbia is the West’s great artery.
Rising in Canada, the river flows southward before running to the Pacific in a great blue ribbon that separates Oregon from Washington.
Multnomah Falls is located along the Columbia River Gorge, a section in which the river is hemmed in by dramatic cliffs.
The birth of the gorge and the string of waterfalls along it is tied to a series of cataclysmic events greater than any experienced in contemporary times.
Geologists now agree that the gorge was formed as one of the ice ages was retreating.
The interior of North America was locked beneath a tremendous sheet of ice. As it began to break up and melt, chunks of ice jammed, damming up enormous amounts of water. The ice gave way and unleashed a wall of water that scoured everything in its path – including walls of rock. The episode was repeated time and again as the earth began to warm and the result is the tourist attraction of today – a dramatic gorge punctuated with a string of waterfalls.
Today, standing in a verdant forest watching water shifting shape on summer breezes, it’s difficult to imagine the violence that created that landscape. But it was easy to appreciate it for what it was: a mix of water and gravity that spells beauty, power and tranquility.
