During the week while I was at work, I stumbled upon some ads for a nearby festival for tulips at the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm. I figured it would be a good way to spend an afternoon with the wife. She could enjoy the farm stuff while I got sweet flower pictures.
I also realized before we left that it was close to a place called Abiqua Falls, which is a falls that gets a lot of love on the internet for how pretty it is but everything I read makes it seem hard to find. It's also a very short hike, which means that to see it, you'd be driving on old country roads for over an hour for a hike that was, effectively, a mile round trip. There is more to it than that, but I didn't know at the time. We'll get to what I mean.
First up: Tulips. We drove to the farm and it was pretty disappointing. I think due to to the extreme winter, the flowers were a little behind schedule for the festival. Only two rows of tulips were in bloom. We walked around but there just wasn't much to see when nothing is there yet. In a few weeks it'll probably look great but for now it looked like a field of green plants.
Since it was about 1pm and we suddenly had nothing to do, I re-proposed the Abiqua idea and we decided to go for it. I'd read it was hard to find, but generally knew where to look from descriptions, so why not try?
About 40 minutes later we reached the gravel section of Crooked Finger Road deep in the cascade foothills. I made the turnoff, saw a lot of other cars/couples, and felt good. Other people is a good sign.
The Abiqua Falls access road is 2 miles downhill and from what I've read, it gets sketchier the farther down you go. With the bad winter causing slides all over the place, I decided to not risk it and we parked at the top. PTSD from Silver Star Mountain. So instead of a 1 mile hike, we now had a 5 mile hike. Whatevs.
The road isn't actually too bad. You can definitely make it down about a mile in your average car to another large parking area before it narrows and gets a little risky. Past that last big pullout, you probably want a jeepish car to be safe. It wasn't that bad but getting stuck down there would suck. The road heads downhill for a mile and then sort of switchbacks west and levels out, following the cliff over the creek. At the end, a few subarus and SUVs were parked by a gate, and a couple of trails went down the hill.
We took the further trail and quickly realized that was not the correct path as it stopped at a cliff and the path down from there looked dangerous. We walked back up and found a much more reasonable option downhill. By reasonable I mean still very steep, but not "kill you if you fell" steep. More "Your ass is gonna get dirty and take some hits as you slide" steep. Some rope was actually on the trees to help. A short .2 miles down the hill and you are at the edge of the very wide and powerful Abiqua Creek. From here you just scramble along the rocky shore for another .3 miles or so till you turn a corner and DAMN SON.
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| The perspective makes this look a lot less steep than it actually was |
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| Abiqua Creek - The trail is the left shore. Yeah |
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| And Boom |
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| The high walls around the falls |
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| The road appeared to be screaming at us |
Abiqua sits in the middle of a huge basalt amphitheater, roaring 100+ feet over the cliff in an absolutely perfect rectangle shape. The theater has tall overhanging cliffs and the echo of the falls just roars throughout. Despite the surprisingly large number of people we saw coming and going, we had the place to ourselves for our whole stay. It's a picture perfect waterfall, tucked away in such a secret place, and it was completely worth the hassle.
Walking back uphill sucked.
Roughly 1,200 feet of elevation gain in about 6ish miles.
Also, as before, here's an art thing of The Old Man of Storr
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