Lewis River Lower and Middle Falls

 Lewis River Trail

Lower Falls of the Lewis River, Washington

I have kayaked on the Lewis river before. There is a paddle that my meetup does called the 4 rivers paddle. You start on a branch of the Lewis, then (within a mile) enter the Lewis main branch and then in another mile right into the Columbia. The Lewis-Columbia confluence is right across river from Warrior Rock and just down river from Bachelor Island. So it is right there where a lot of paddling gets done. 

Now I am sure that Lewis was pretty happy with himself the day he named the river after himself (well, maybe Clark named it after Lewis) but it seems unfair that it gets named after the first white guy to float by the mouth.  I bet he never even explored it.

I think this is Yale Lake

But today we are not paddling the Lewis, we are hiking it. And we are doing so many miles up stream in the Mt Saint Helens south flank area. The Lewis starts way up there and is dammed a number of times on the way down making a string of pretty lakes. Pacific Corp runs the Dams and uses them for generating Electricity. They also own and run the parks and campgrounds around these lakes. The lakes are called Merwin, Yale, and Swift. The road going up the North side of these lakes is Washington 503 and it is the same road that you would follow to get to Lake Cave or Ape Cave (LINK to my blog on these). We are driving way up forest road 90 into the Gifford Pinchot forest. After you leave Swift lake behind, the road gets a bit narrow and torn up. You need to drive carefully and be ready to dodge fallen rocks and sunken grades. Just before you get to our campground, there is a 100 yards of road washout that is still unpaved (but passable). 

We are driving up to Lower Falls campground. We are arriving the day after the last day of reserved camping when it is first come first serve. We were hoping to get a campsite and we were not dissapointed. There were plenty and we got a nice one close enough to the river that we could here the falls at night. This campground is on a little peninsula that sticks out into a bend in the river. So it has river on 3 sides. At the West end of the campground is the Lower Falls themselves. My partner and I hiked down to that to start our hiking exercise for the day. It is a very beautiful falls. It sits right where a lava flow came out into the river so there is a nice wide steep fall going down to a very deep pool. It is also extremely popular in the on season and so a lot of signs and fences have been put up to keep people away from the cliffs and try and preserve the lives of the unwary or idiotic. At the base of the falls is a deep pool with a shallow flat rock table that extends from the shore out 20 yards or so. Looks like you could walk through 6 inch deep water right to where it drops down to 40, just a down yards from the cascading falls. If you could get down there it would be great swimming…

My partner and I then headed up river along the trail. This took us around the rim of the campground and then on up the trail toward Middle Falls (the fall namers must have been having a rough day). This is a pretty easy hike and we are not planning on going all that far today. We still have to set up our campsite and make dinner and such and…. Well and I am recovering from full knee replacement surgery and this is my first time taking this knee our for a spin on a real trail and carrying a backpack. There are some great views on this little hike and some HUGE trees. As is true in many places, the really big trees are either cut down stumps or ancient dead burned things that just weren’t worth the bother of cutting down when the lumberjacks came through a century ago.

See the pillar?

Nurse log

Out in the river a mile above the campground were a couple of cement pillars. We thought they were perhaps old uprights for a train bridge, perhaps a logging bridge. But both sides of the river were sheer cliffs at that point so no idea where a train would be going. Our second guess is that they were some sort of thing for constructing a simple small dam (perhaps out of logs) for running a log flume. I am now going to go look it up and see if someone else knows what they are. OK, it is the remains of a bridge that was built to herd sheep across when moving them up to a meadow for summer grazing. It was called “The Sheep Bridge”. So, it was probably named by the same guy that named the falls. There used to be a campsite on the South side of the bridge that people would walk over to and camp on. There is a nice memory of it here <link>.

The campsites at Lower Falls are really nice. They have huge trees, thick surrounding undergrowth and lots of space. We had a ‘normal’ size space (as opposed to a double) and there was room for at least 4 cars and 3 tents. And the neighbors are far enough away that you can’t really see or hear them (except for the one 5 year old standing on a log with a lantern and making owl noises). I mentioned the surrounding undergrowth? It was lush and beautiful, I saw bunch berry, sword fern, mahonia, and vanilla leaf (I think that is a real plant), and lots of moss.

Our Campsite (#10)

this picture taken from the picnic table in our campsite

What the campground doesn’t have is a place to dispose of waste water. A lot of campgrounds these days have places to dump waste water, usually a round clay cylinder with a screen over it that sticks up a couple of feet and leads down to drainage. But here, I guess it just goes into the forest. Doesn’t sound quite right to me, mainly because I don’t trust most campers I see to do the right thing with their waste. For instance, I often see people doing their camp dishes at the water spigot. Please keep your soap and food particles away from the water source !! That probably isn’t a problem at this site since there is only one water source and it is a huge hand pump. I wonder if there is a line at the pump during the summer when the park is full. 

The next day we drove up to the Trailhead near middle falls and then hiked on in to them. The trail was windy and soft surrounded by lots of big doug firs. You cross a bridge over a little stream with a 30 foot fall. At one point there was what looked to be a dry stream bed but it was very smooth and covered with a thin layer of green moss. I suspect this may have been an old lava flow.

The middle falls are reached by a little switch back trail right at a little signed crossroads. They are pretty nice though not as spectacular as the lower falls. After visiting the falls we hiked a ways up the main trail toward the upper falls. We just wanted some more exercise. The trail here is all very sheer down to the rive with some huge cliffs towering (and overhanging) in some places. Toward the river is always an extremely steep slide. So we turn around and are heading back toward the car and just before we got back to the nice switch back trail down to the middle falls we see this older couple (i.e. my age) working their way down the hill very carefully. It is very steep and the woman is following the man with some evident hesitation. She is wearing shorts and tennis shoes and neither of them is carrying a rope. I was thinking “gee, that isn’t too smart” but my partner was a bit nicer and called out “hi” to them. They stopped and said hi and the guy asked if the view of the falls was worth this climb down in the gully. Holy Crap. We straightened them out. Told them that there was a nice trail just back along here 50 feet. With a sign and everything (OK, I didn’t say that). They were both very relieved. My partner was of the opinion that the woman just need a little more help saying No. Or perhaps “Hell No”. 

signs at the middle falls turn

Middle falls

big trees

These are huge roots growing along side the trail from a big tree above.

This was late in the season, last nice weekend in September, and we saw maybe 10 people out on the trail. This trail must be LOADED during the summer. Probably because people read about how nice it is in my blog.