Elk Creek Upper Falls

Northwest Return Travelog #6
Elk Creek, ID - Fri, 30 Jul 2021. 2pm.

After visiting Lower Falls on Elk Creek and then Middle Falls you just know there's going to be an Upper Falls. I mean, this is not like American fast food restaurants where there are two sizes, Medium and Large. Sure enough, there is an Upper Falls.



Though Upper Falls is noticeably smaller than the other two it's pretty in its own way. Among other things, we could get up close to it. From where I shot these photos we could feel the cooling spray of the water in the air. If we'd wanted we probably could've waded through the pool up to its base. Alas we didn't bring our swimming clothes... though with the day's scorching heat we our regular clothes probably would've dried by the time we got back to the trailhead.

In my previous two blogs I shared pics I had fun taking with my neutral density filter on my camera lens. Did I take some here? Youbetcha.



These photos didn't achieve quite the effect I was looking for, though. There's actually too much sun in this scene for even the darkest setting on my filter! The pic above was taken at about 0.125 seconds. Even swift water like at these falls needs a speed closer to 0.25 seconds for that really silky effect.

After spending a while at Elk Creek's Upper Falls we trudged back up the hill to the trailhead.

Raspberries

Seemingly no waterfall hike in the Pacific Northwest would be complete without a shout out to our love-it/hate-it guidebook, Dr. Smedley Q. Boredom's Very Dull Book of Waterfalls. Smedley found us this great trio of waterfalls, though he wasn't very lucid about how awesome they are. A- on that. His driving directions were... a little off near the end. B. His trail descriptions were way off, including the mileage between points. According to him our trek today would've been almost 6 miles. Instead, Hawk's step counter measured just over 3.5. D for trail directions. Fortunately for us the trails in the park were well signed.

Dinner in Moscow, Idaho

Northwest Return Travelog #7
Moscow, ID - Fri, 30 Jul 2021. 5:30pm.

This afternoon we took a slight detour on the way back from hiking Elk Creek. Instead of retracting our route directly back to Clarkston we angled due west for a while to the town of Moscow, Idaho. There was a gem shop Hawk wanted to visit there, and it seemed like a good place to find dinner sooner than getting back to Lewiston/Clarkston.

Moscow has a still-active old time-y downtown. It's a college town, so a constant stream of fresh energy— and especially, fresh money— has kept the town from rusting out the way most of Small Town America has.

Moscow reminds me of Chapel Hill, NC, where I was a graduate student. The town is part old time-y holdout, part arty bohemian cheap-chic, and part yuppie. Though last time I visited Chapel Hill (a few years ago) the yuppie stuff had overgrown the main street like kudzu in North Carolina's pine forests.

For dinner we picked a Mexican restaurant with sidewalk dining. That was important to us as Idahoans have largely stopped wearing masks. "It's optional," everyone says, pointing to the CDC guidance that says masks should be worn by everyone not fully vaccinated. The Idaho Panhandle is an area with less than a 40% full vaccination rate, yet the region's no-mask rate is over 90%. As one comedian recently quipped, "Somebody up in that bitch lyin'!"

Food at the restaurant was good, especially for being a) so far from the Mexican border and b) in a small town. Though that's kind of what we expected from a college small town, as opposed to a dying small town.