Lower South Falls

I’ve been craving visits to natural places new to me or that I get to infrequently. It’s easy to stick around my neck of the woods full of nearby beautiful spots; especially as I commit to driving less. I’m balancing that with life’s unknowns: moments any of us have left to enjoy earthly delights. Silver Falls State Park is one of those places I’ve been dreaming about all summer.

I suspect most who visit these magnificent waterfalls retain memories of their glories. Though I’m always awestruck in each visit I make to Silver Falls, I too harbor intense feelings of sentimentality. How many times did our family walk together on this Trail of Ten Falls, I wonder? More than once in high school I joined my parents but jogged ahead, only to meet them back at the parking lot. Add to those the trips my parents’ made without kids, and my own with my foursome family or alone with Russ. Lots of family waterfall viewing.

I join a small number of Willamette Valley kids now grown up who attended Outdoor School at Silver Creek. My sixth grade class from Wilsonville Elementary experienced Outdoor School at Silver Creek Falls back in May of 1972. Our school in those days boasted one class per grade plus a blended grade a few years younger than me. Our counselors hailed from West Linn High including the daughter of our teacher “Mr.” Oldenstadt. We were more family than anything, so many of us traveling the same class since kindergarten with barely more than twenty others. I still remember sleeping up in the balcony area of the barn, girls on one side and boys on the other. I had a crush on my classmate Mike and was sad he wasn’t in my “group.” But I too remember what I learned about forestry and land resources all those years ago, including figuring out the age of massive Douglas firs. More than any of that, the sheer joy of being in the midst of this spot for a week of school was heaven to me. (It was only two months later when our family moved from Wilsonville and I lost the intimacy of this community-based school and became a new, shy LaGrande Junior High seventh grader. But that is more than another story.)

Earlier this week I drove in to the park our usual route through Silverton, but I was alone as I was ultimately heading to a meeting in Salem. No matter which direction you enter the park from, the existence of nearby grand waterfalls seems like a hidden surprise. It’s not like in the Columbia River Gorge where you expect them to be spilling over canyon walls. To me it makes it even more of a treasure. It’s still hard for me to imagine how stream erosion over the length of Silver Creek has created this magnificent spillage. My geologist husband would remind me, also, how rocks from three different episodes of geologic history are exposed in the waterfalls and creek beds. Below the rock of the park is sandstone from when this area was part of the Oregon Coast. Some of the sandstone was quarried to build the Stone Shelter in the days of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The cliffs are formed by Wanapum and Grande Ronde Basalts or what some may refer to as the Columbia River Flood Basins. The basalt deposits are topped with volcanic ash or Volcanic Tuff that can erode easily.

South Falls

Silver Falls also boasts other historic features including an area within it listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. It earned its way onto the list by serving as an example of a new vision for recreational planning by the National Park Service in the Depression. We can thank the men (yes, men only then) of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Projects Administration for building the infrastructure of the park between 1935 and 1942. Hiking the trails today, I can’t imagine the difficult work involved in creating the trails, rock walls, buildings, bridges and picnic shelters. This brings me back to feeling sentimental: I’d love to ask my dad the once-history-buff to help me imagine what it was like for folks who had the ability to get out and take in this magnificence while rebounding from the depression. As with so much in Oregon and beyond, none of this acknowledges the long ago Kalapuyan and Molalla Peoples forced off this same lands a century prior. Sigh.

Drake Falls

Middle North Falls

Even as I remember our local trails before they got as crowded as they might today, I try to remind myself it is good more people discover being in nature . . .as long as we don’t “love it to death.” I sometimes coach myself before going to popular places on weekends that it’s okay to share with everyone. But I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you when I arrived to only two cars in the parking lot this week, after leaving home at the crack of dawn, I felt jubilant.

I love this park in all weather – wet spring as Silver Creek roars and waterfalls burst with volume, autumn’s gigantic maple trees displaying golden-orange leaves, winter’s icicles forming on creek and waterfall edges. This day, though, after our hot, dry summer, I was invigorated by the light rain as it sprinkled on me as I began to hike. It felt perfect. It was perfect.

Silver Creek

Looking to read about other Oregon and beyond memories? Check out My Music Man and Then, Now and In-Between: Place, Memories and Loss in Oregon or my other blogs.