We woke up fairly early in the morning, relatively, I think. It wasn’t super early, and I might even be wrong about that. Maybe we slept in. I honestly don’t remember. But I think we woke up early because we had gone to bed early, comparatively.
Anyway, one of the first things that we noticed was a park ranger who was driving around the camp. I realized that we had not put our license plate number on our little fee stub when they filled it out last night.
At first, I didn’t really think it was necessary to do anything about it, so we just kept on eating breakfast. Eventually, though, he came around again, and I was a little concerned the second time, so I got out with our pay stub and mentioned that we had forgotten to put the license plate number on the self-serve fee stub, and also that I didn’t know where we were supposed to display the fee stub. He Said not to worry about it, that he had been able to match up the year and model that we had put on the c envelope thingy with our lovely little vehicle in our parking spot.
So we were good to go there.
After breakfast, we walked down to the river and rinsed out all of our dishes in the river.
Crazy cold river. 🧊
We took our dishes back to the van, noticing along the way that there was a massive fallen tree log that had a whole bunch of trees just growing out of the top of it. It was probably like a 4-ft diameter trunk that had fallen that had become the nutrient base for a bunch of new trees, one of them maybe 20 ft tall already? I don’t remember for sure. But there were several trees growing right out of the top of that fallen log.
That was pretty cool.
After washing our dishes, we walked down the trail to the lookout for lower falls. It was an absolutely beautiful waterfall, where a very wide river, probably at least 100 ft, if not 200, basically just falls over a cliff. The cliff is further down in some spots than others, so it’s not just one falls all in the same spot all the way across. It falls a little earlier on one spot and then a little later over there, and then a bunch more on the main cliff at the end.
Beautiful.
I wanted to do some cliff jumping. The main cliff was probably I’m going to guess 50 or 60 ft above the water, and it looked like it was a really deep pool that it dropped into. Unfortunately, because it wasn’t sunny, I couldn’t see through the water, and it was crazy cold water, so it would have taken a good bit of energy and a significant loss of body heat just to figure out How deep the water was.
I probably could have easily been talked into the adventure provided I had another person willing to get icy icy cold and jump from that height. Chase, I’m looking at you!
But as it was, I wasn’t really up for doing it by myself when it was crazy cold and going to be a lot of effort just to figure out if it was safe to jump.
We also probably would have needed to measure the height to make sure we felt comfortable jumping from that height without damaging our bodies. It was definitely pretty high up, but it’s been a long time since New Zealand, so I can’t really remember exactly how far above the water it looked when we were there.
We took a bunch of really great pictures of those falls, and then we headed back to the van.
We had to be out of the campground by 2:00, I think it was, or maybe it was 1:00. I don’t remember for sure. So we packed up our stuff, and decided to drive up the road to see Middle Falls. There was a lower, a middle, and a number falls, so we drove up the road, and we parked our little car in the parking lot of Middle Falls, and set off for our walk to Middle Falls.
On our walk to Middle Falls, we passed a pretty little falls called upper copper Creek Falls. It was just a little thing, but it was picturesque in the middle of the towering evergreen-tree forest. If I had to guess, it was probably 30 or 40 ft tall, and just a skinny little thing that dropped down into a small pool of water before continuing on down its little micro canyon.
Though it didn’t have any real cliffs to jump off of, I think Middle Falls was my favorite. The river had carved deep channels in the bedrock in ways that make me think that it was probably a different kind of rock that was taking up those spaces that was much more easily carved away. Either that, or it was like that originally and was just because of how the lava flows went. I don’t know, but I loved how the water snaked through those deep channels that you could easily go swimming in if you wanted to. Again, I wanted to, but it was super cold. One of those things where you just need friends to egg you on. 🙃
On a summer day, it would have been a no-brainer. But in the maybe 50° weather, or whatever it was, and the fact that it was also misting and raining outside, didn’t help tip the scales toward making the leap into the frigid waters.
Nor had I brought my little microfiber washcloth to dry off with.
Even though I didn’t make a leap or take a swim, I loved the waterfall itself. On the left side as you’re looking up the river, it was like a big water slide. It reminded me a heck of a lot of Te Reinga Falls in the North Island of New Zealand.
Anyway, we took a bunch of videos and pictures and whatnot in that absolutely beautiful spot. Gosh, I would love to have a place like that close to home, or better yet, on my own property. 🙃
It’s just heaven.
Since we had already gone to lower Falls and Middle Falls, how could we skip upper Falls? 🙃
So we hopped in ET and headed up the road to Upper Falls.
The walk to upper Falls, just looking at the location of the parking lot in relation to the river on Google maps seem like it would be shorter than the walk to Middle Falls, which was a decent little hike. And it started off kind of fun with an absolutely massive tree that I want to say was maybe 8 ft in diameter right close toward the parking lot just as your starting the walk toward the falls.
The Falls, however, didn’t end up being as close to the parking lot as I had expected. Instead of going in a relatively straight line from the parking lot to the river, and having the waterfall be right there, it actually went to the river and then started falling the river downstream.
As an additional surprise, before we ever even got to upper Falls, we passed another waterfall. I don’t remember the name of the falls. We’ve got it written down somewhere, and it’s not even one that was listed on the map, but it was still a beautiful little fall. We took a few pictures, and then decided to keep heading down the trail. We didn’t know for sure whether or not that was actually upper falls and just had another name, or if there was still another upper falls, but looking at the map, it showed us still a little ways away from upper Falls, so we can continue down the trail along the river for a good little ways.
Eventually, we made our way down from a good ways above the river downstream until the path switch back down just a little bit to the overlook of upper Falls. Upper Falls also reminded me a little bit of Te Reinga Falls in New Zealand, although much much smaller.
We snapped more pictures, took in the beautiful views, and then headed back to the van. By that time, I think my mom had already gone 10,000 steps as shown on her pedometer. I think I was closer to like 8,000, or something like that.
Lots and lots of walking. 😊
The next goal was to go to ape cave. Craig had mentioned that when we said we were going to Mount St Helens, so we put it on our list of places to go see. So we drove from upper Falls back down the windy mountain road with the overhanging forest over the road all the way down to the turn off for Ape Cave. That also happened to be the same road that we would go for a gorgeous overlook of Mount St Helens from the south. You wouldn’t be able to see down into the crater from the direction we were coming, but the overlook that allows you to see down into the crater was inaccessible because of a landslide that had taken out the road. A landslide had also taken out the eastern route that goes from the southeast side of Mount Saint Helens to the Northeast side of Mount St Helens.
Anyway, we drove up to Ape Cave, which is like a two plus mile long lava tube, we’ll need to find out that we needed reservations, and that the last available time that you were allowed to go into the cave was like 3:00 or 3:30.
It’s a self-guided cave, so it’s not like you’re waiting for a tour group or a guide or anything like that, but I think it’s just a safety measure. You have to provide your own headlamps and all that other stuff, and I think they just want to know who all is going to be in the cave.
And my younger years, I might have just gone ahead and gone in, but in my later years I put more stock into respecting the rules and guidelines of the places I visit.
So the cave our first fail for the day, the first of… many. 😅
So we left Ape cave and drove up the road to the Mount St Helens viewpoint. We were just about positive that that there really wouldn’t be of you to see it all because it was clouded over and rainy, but it was just another 15 or 20 minutes or so up the road and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet, so we figured we drive up to the lookout point, eat lunch, and cross our fingers that may be perhaps the clouds would lift, and we would be able to see Mount Saint Helens.
So we drove up the road, pulled out our food and ate a little bit, and waited in vain for the clouds to break.
Though the clouds didn’t break, the rain died down a little bit, and we took a little stroll on a path next to the parking lot. I thought it was a loop, but it just kept going, so we turned back, as it was pretty cold.
No cave. No St. Helens.
Fail #2. 🙃
From our attempt tent at seeing Mount St Helens, it was already pretty late in the day, so we headed away from the park in an effort to try and get to Centralia in time for my mom to have a little visit with her friend before it was too late.
We realized fairly quickly, however, that it probably wasn’t going to work, as it was probably going to be somewhere around 9:00 before we would even make it to her apartment.
By the time we had figured that out, however, we were already well into civilization, and we figured that we would just stop at a truck stop for the night like we normally did. There were a couple of truck stops near Centralia, but when we went over to check them out, They both had signs prohibiting overnight parking, so that was a no-go.
We popped over to an aamco that was nearby, getting gas, and seriously toying with the idea of staying there, but then we decided that we needed to stop by Walmart, which was another 15 minutes or so up the road.
Why would we need to stop at Walmart? Well, I forgot to mention one of the events of the day that happened relatively early in the morning.
When we got up for the day, and I crawled into the back of the van, I noticed that the rule of toilet paper inside my hiking pack had been chewed up.
😬
So we started looking around, and we found that one of the loaves of bread had the bag chewed through and there was a pile of breadcrumbs that had all been chewed into a nice neat little pile. I also found that they had crawled into my cocoa roo/marshmallow maties cereal and had been chewing on the cereal inside.
Was that it? No, I found an apple that had had a large chunk chewed out of it, almost the size of a ping pong ball. They had also found one of my mom’s chocolates and dragged it out underneath the bed between the different things we had the bed propped up on, and they’d probably eaten through half of that chocolate.
I forget what else they chewed through, but they certainly went to town. 😅
So we decided to head on over to Walmart to get some traps so that we didn’t risk another night of massive exploitation. 🙃
So we headed over there, found some traps, set them all up, and then gave up on finding a place nearby to sleep. I found a pilot truck stop and a flying j truck stop another 20 minutes up the highway, 20 minutes the wrong way from where we needed to be the next day, but it seems like our best choice. We had been able to stay at pilots in the past, so we figured it was a good chance that we could do that again.
Along the way, however, my mom suggested that we stop off at the rest area, and not noticing any signs saying that we weren’t allowed to stay overnight, and seeing that there were several dozen cars parked in the huge rest area, we decided to crash there for the night. We parked right across from the bathrooms, just like in our campsites, and we were grateful that the bathrooms were clean and nice.
It was funny that we had so many things go wrong today. It was that day where we had been talking a lot about disappointment. After not being able to go to the ape cave, there was a sense of disappointment. And as we talked about it, we talked about how disappointment was an unnecessary feeling. It seemed to me that disappointment came a more from a hope than it did from an expectation, and as we talked about it, the more, to me, it seemed like if one were always excited about whatever happened, then disappointment would melt away because one would always be looking forward to whatever was coming next, no matter what it was.
There’s a lot more to unpack in that but I’m not going to go into in this short little journal entry, but it was ironic after having that conversation after the first cave fail and the disappointment felt, that so many things went sideways.
Anyway, that was our day!
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 