Kentucky Falls

On Saturday this past weekend we hiked the Kentucky Falls trail in Oregon. It's about 50 miles west of Eugene in the Siuslaw National Forest. It was part of our busy Saturday with visiting the Cascades Raptor Center and then going hiking.

Kentucky Falls is in a somewhat remote area. Traffic was initially heavy on highway 126 as we drove west from Eugene. The city has expanded a lot to the west since the last time we visited, several years ago. Traffic tapered off as we entered the coast range mountains, then became fairly sparse as we turned off the highway onto Forest Service and BLM roads. These at least were in better condition than during our previous visit to Kentucky Falls in 2016.

...Yes, we've been to Kentucky Falls before. So why go back? Well, click the link above to see why they're worth going back to. Or just scroll down for more.



The trail to Kentucky Falls starts off easy at first, dropping gently into a creek canyon surrounded with mixed-growth forest. The trail then descends more steeply down a switchback to near the base of Kentucky Falls, a two-tier waterfall about 100 feet high.

This view from near the base disguises the upper tier of the falls. Here's a view from higher up on the trail that shows the upper tier(s) better:



I captured this photo on the walk back out. The vantage point is hard to spot on the way in because it requires turning around to look backwards. So it's easy to miss on the way in but easy to catch on the way out.

Based on these two photos you might think all I did was hike to Kentucky Falls. If that's all I had done, this trail would have been worth the effort. Kentucky Falls is only about .75 mile in from the trailhead and entails an ascent of a few hundred feet on the return. But put in the work to go 2 miles in, and climb out an extra several hundred feet on the return, and there are two more waterfalls here just as nice as this one. Stay tuned for those!

In beauty I walk.

Hiking Lower Kentucky and Smith Creek Falls

In my previous blog I wrote about hiking to Kentucky Falls in the coastal mountains west of Eugene, Oregon. I remarked that if all I did was get to Kentucky Falls and turn around, it would've been a decent hike. But I didn't turn around there. I went over a mile further (and several hundred vertical feet lower) to reach more falls.



Kentucky Creek plunges over a falls even more dramatic than the first one on the trail. This is Lower Kentucky Falls. There's a nice wooden viewing platform here. Some younger people scrambled up the slippery rocks to the pool below the lowest tier of the falls. You can see one of them in the photo above.

If you "zoom out" on the view from the wooden platform you see something else, too....



There's another fairly tall falls right next to Lower Kentucky Falls. The one on the left is Smith Creek Falls. The two creek plunge over the same rocky ledge then merge together just below it.

While I didn't feel like joining the younger adults scrambling up to the base of Lower Kentucky Falls, I did decide to scramble downstream to the confluence of the two creeks and then up to the base of Smith Creek Falls.

My inspiration for doing this was two-fold. First, I remembered some of the waterfalls in Oahu (Hawaii) we visited last year, where the trail basically disappeared the last 100 meters of the way and we had to boulder-bash our way up the creek. This was no worse than that. Second, as I started downstream to judge if it was worth continuing, my sunglasses slipped off and fell down an 8' tall drop. They landed atop a rock, so they weren't lost in the water. But at that point I figured, "In for a penny, in for a pound," and decided to go the whole way.



I picked my way carefully and found plenty of rocks and logs in the creeks to make my way down to the confluence and up the other creek to the base of Smith Creek Falls, without getting my feet wet. "Will it be worth the effort?" I wondered as I started. When I got to the point where I took the photo above, it totally was. ...Okay, recovering my sunglasses was worth the effort. I hate having to buy new sunglasses. The views were gravy.

In beauty I walk.