7/18/2017 - Waterfall Drive

Tuesday - Joe tried to call Camping World this morning but he couldn't get them to answer the phone, so we just drove over there.  Funny, they couldn't wait on him for a while because they had customers on the phone they were dealing with.  Finally, they talked to him but didn't have any fan motors in stock.  They did give us a price of a whole new unit ($1,187) but they are supposed to call him back with a price of just the fan motor.  No call back yet.

So we got on with our day.  Today was FINALLY our Waterfall Drive.  That is the one thing I wanted to do here, and on our last day, we are doing it.  We started at the west end, and worked our way east.  The guy at the sternwheeler counter the other day gave us a map of the falls and a little specific information about things not to miss.  On the way to our first side road, we passed the Women's Forum Outlook, so we got a few more pictures of the river.

From there we could see the Crown Point Vista House, which we drove right by but didn't stop at (no parking space).

 We turned onto our side road which was the 14-mile Larch Mountain Road, which ends in Sherrard Viewpoint, with a view of 5 mountains:  St. Helens, Rainier, Adams, Hood and Jefferson.  The road that took us to the viewpoint was totally foresty, dappled with sunlight.  Very pretty drive.

The trail wasn't too bad but ended with lots of steps.  But we could see all 5 mountains.

 Mt. Hood

 Mt. St. Helen

 I think this is Mt. Adams

For some reason my pictures of the other two didn't turn out very good.  Mt. Rainier was too hazy.  Don't know what happened with Mt. Jefferson.

From there we began the waterfall drive.
Latourell Falls

 There was a bridge maybe halfway up this one, the largest Multnomah Falls, and of course, Joe had to walk up to it, so I dragged along.   The picture below is the people below, from our viewpoint on the bridge (where the first picture was taken).

These two are taken from the bridge.

 

Here's Joe with his famous wave.

Next was Oneonta Gorge, which also has a falls but it was a mile walk.  The sternwheeler guy told us we just needed to walk as far as the log jam, so that's what we did.  But the trail was a little rough.

 We left our water shoes back at the car and Joe could hardly stand it that he couldn't wade across this little stream for a better look at the log jam.  But he finally walked away from it.

 Well, sort of.  The next time I looked, he was walking on a log.  It's tough to be old in body and young at heart.

And we still had the steps back up to the parking lot.

Then we checked out the tunnel here.

The last waterfall we did was Horsetail Falls.

I turned around to talk to Joe and couldn't find him -- he was down at the water level.  There were swimmers here, lucky he wasn't out there with them.

Then I ran into our buddies here. They kept looking for Joe too, but he was still down at the water. This was our last falls, and their first.  But we got together for a group photo.

There was one more falls on this road (Elowah Falls), but it was past the entrance to the freeway so we skipped it and headed back across the Bridge of the Gods.  Collins and Marilyn were headed the other way to one or two more falls.  After crossing the bridge, we drove up to the town of Stevenson, looking for dinner.  As we drove down by the river, we spotted some kite boarders again, so we had to watch them for a while.  They were practicing some maneuvers -- catching some air and doing somersaults, etc.  I kept trying to catch one of these on my camera and I did a couple, plus a wipeout. I'm thinking this might become the next new Olympic sport.

We ended up at Andrew's Pizza -- hard to go wrong with Andrew.  And finally, after a couple more side roads, Joe took me home.  I logged 11,372 steps today and I feel every one of them right now.  I think I have figured out a fix to get my horizontall pictures to stay vertical when I rotate them -- if not, there will be a lot of pictures sideways on this blog.

This was an awesome day.  We didn't make it back to the second powerhouse on the dam, but I got to see my waterfalls!  And I am tired!