A stroll in the Parks: Day 5 Morning through Afternoon in the Columbia River Gorge

The photos in today's post are all from the Columbia River Gorge, which exceeded my expectations. The area has the highest concentration of tall waterfalls in North America.

This Art Deco visitor's center in the park, located on the cliffs of the gorge was an attraction in itself. The stain glass window included further down is from inside.

Some of these are actually different waterfalls, however I admit there are multiples of a couple.

I like how you can see the volcanic rock in the picture above, the formations remind me of Devil's tower, also pretty awesome if you ever have the opportunity to see it.

These photos are of the Gorge's largest waterfall Multnomah Falls, which is a huge tourist attraction complete with a classic Lodge, restaurant, snack stand, and a horrible parking shortage. It was worth the road rage to find a space (actually since I was on vacation I recall being very mellow-albeit probably more high strung than 85% of the Portlandians). Like most of the waterfalls, it involved a nice 1-2 mile hike. Needless to say after seeing several we did a lot of walking. We had a lovely park service hot dog here, and some chips- the kind that try too hard to be Yuppie-tastic and leave you wanting a bag of Utz.

I know- these photos are almost exactly alike but the top one show's the vibrancy of the trees better, where the bottom photo includes more of the two falls, the top one is 542 feet tall, and the bottom one 69 feet. Pretty damn awesome if I do say so myself.

Aw shucks, you're taking a photo of little ole me? Oh yeah... the sodas were ridiculous. I can't remember if we were smart enough to just get one, but retrospectively I like to think so. I'm representing Maine here with my BIW shirt.

This little waterfall and the bridge below involved a longer hike along ledge in the wall of the gorge. It was late afternoon and once you got up high enough away from the sound of the traffic, the light coming down through the trees and the sound of the water was total serenity. Just don't go in the poison Oak! We successfully avoided it.

This tunnel is no longer in use and is only maintained as a tourist attraction. Some photos in the visitor's center indicated that there are more of these nifty tunnels in the gorge, some of which you can still drive through and they have windows out of the side of the tunnel into the gorge below. Sadly we did not find them.

There was a sort of here.... and it seemed tempting to walk in, if the water weren't icy and I wasn't certain I was going to come out with some sort of leech on me. Also, I have this feeling that walking under a 70 foot waterfall doesn't quite work like it does in the movies. Just call it a hunch.