Raven Falls Journal

Like every photographer, I have a “bucket list” of locations I have yet to visit, but where I want to eventually shoot.  In the immediate Northwest area, my top “must-photograph” locations going into 2010 were places such as Shi-Shi and Second Beaches, the lavender fields at Sequim, more of the Oregon coast, Crater Lake, and what I’ve been referring to as the “four Ps”:  Punch Bowl Falls (and the rest of Eagle Creek), Painted Hills, the Palouse, and Proxy Falls.

In mid-June, I got the chance to check the last of these off my list.

Proxy Falls is as far afield as I’ve traveled on a photo “day-trip” — approximately six to seven hours each way. Normally, the farthest I’ll travel is about four-and-a-half hours away, and I really wasn’t prepared for the road time. At other times, I might have considered making this an overnighter; but, needing to be home for Father’s Day, that wasn’t an choice. And, since this might have been the last June weekend day with overcast in the forecast (June being supposedly the best month for shooting this fall) I figured it was “now or never.”

Proxy Falls Trail is laid out as a loop, and every guidebook I’ve seen recommends hiking it in a clockwise direction, it being shorter and easier to get to both of the two falls, at which point you can decide to backtrack instead of completing the longer part of the loop. Upon arriving, I found out that this was not an option, due to (in the words of other hikers there) a “house-sized log” blocking the desired trailhead. The only choice was to go counterclockwise and then return the way I’d come, meaning a longer and harder hike.

In any event, I made it up the trail, past the spur to Proxy itself, to the first (and smallest) waterfall, Upper Proxy Falls (sometimes just known as Upper Falls).

Normally, Upper Proxy Falls drop into a fifteen-foot-diameter plunge-pool (which, interestingly, appears to lead nowhere, the water vanishing underground to reappear some distance later).  However, because of the unusually-high water levels in the Oregon Cascades at this time of the year, the plunge-pool was more like thirty-five or forty feet in diameter, meaning that the ideal tripod position would have been in a foot or three  of water. Since I didn’t know this, I didn’t bring my waders on this hike, and so had to be content with trying to find a set of tripod holes on a steep slope going down to the pool; even the “best” views were blocked by something or other.

Leaving Upper Proxy behind, I moved on to the “main attraction,” Proxy Falls, renowned as one of the most photogenic waterfalls in the country.

The picture included here doesn’t begin to do it justice, simply because you can’t really convey scale in an web-sized image; imagine a fall 250 feet high, with the water breaking into dozens of mini-trails over moss-covered rock, then dropping through an undercut onto a series of basalt “steps” somewhat resembling Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. As you look at the photo, also imagine a sense of the water constantly in motion on its multitude of passages, instead of being frozen in time by the camera’s shutter. I wish I could find a way to convey it; “breathtaking” doesn’t come close to an accurate description.

Still, as impressive as that was, I was well aware that the best photos I’ve seen of Proxy Falls haven’t been from the upper viewpoint, but up-close-and-personal ones from the riverbed directly below the falls. Accordingly, after taking a bunch of “record shots” from the viewpoint, I packed up my equipment and started to follow the trail down to the base of the falls.

And, then, I discovered Proxy Falls’ “inconvenient truth” — there is no trail down to the base of the falls. The trail basically stops just past the viewpoint, and it is up to the visitor to figure out a route down a moderately-steep, slippery slope to the river’s edge a hundred or so feet down — and, just as importantly, a route back up again.

After making a couple of attempts on my own, each ending when I found myself clinging to a tree-trunk, realizing that the next step might cause irreparable damage to either my bones or, worse, my equipment, I went back to the upper viewpoint and asked if anyone there had experience getting down to the base. As it turned out, the only ones I found were a couple of young kids toting some expensive-looking photo gear, who proceeded to show me their route — unfortunately, while it looked quite a bit easier than the ones I tried, it was blocked by a fallen tree-trunk which was quite easy for young kids to duck under, but thoroughly impossible for a less-than-agile fifty-something like myself. (In any event, the same two kids returned a few minutes later, reporting that the aforementioned high water meant extremely slippery conditions at the base of the falls, plus enough spray to make photography down there pointless.)

So, with no other option available, all I could do was return to the upper viewpoint, break out the telephoto, and try to get “close-up” shots from a distance.  Interestingly, after getting home and processing my images, I discovered that one of the compositions was very close to Greg Vaughn’s photo on the cover of his excellent Photographing Oregon book — a shot that I always assumed was taken from lower down and closer to the falls!

Meanwhile, on the way back to the road, the trail took me through a forest glade just as the sun illuminated the small tree at its center, and, afterward, through a lava-flow from an extinct volcano, with new growth emerging from the volcanic rocks and remains of older growth providing a sobering reminder of what is often the fate of living things trying to gain a toehold among the stones.

So, cross one item off my bucket list.  Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to come back before long, this time with the gear I’d need (trekking poles, in particular) to get down to the base of the falls.  If I do so, though, I’ll make sure to do it on a long weekend, when I can stay overnight and give Proxy the attention it deserves.