Day One: Eagle Creek Trail

My mind has never been blown to pieces so many times in one day. After we set up camp at Viento State Park, we drove a few miles down the gorge to Eagle Creek Trail. Honestly, I felt like I was on Pandora from the movie Avatar. Every ten feet Jurgen stopped to photograph something while the rest of us kept hiking with our mouths hanging open. I have been to a lot of gorgeous places but this topped them all.

Picture yourself walking through a forest with ferns spilling over into the path, moss in shades of lime and sea foam green cover the rocks and hang from the trees, on your right water splashes downstream towards the Columbia River. Slowly the grade gets stepper and through a break in the trees you see a meadow filled with tie dyed flowers with pink fading to blue, vibrant orange, glowing yellow, and white all painting the side of the mountain. The river is now at the bottom of the cliff you are walking along the edge of as you carefully make your way around a waterfall. Across the canyon you can see tree covered walls growing straight from the creek to the sky, the tops are almost beyond your view.

At any distance this trail held enough to captivate me for hours, just standing in one spot. Once when I stopped to take tally, I found four different types of ferns, tiny daisy-like flowers (small enough to fit 15 on my thumbnail), eleven varieties of leafy plants, vines, moss-covered rocks and tree trunks, two different types of white flowers, yellow and orange flowers, a few beetles with red ruby-like bodies, and clover. If I shifted my gaze a bit farther, I saw rays of sunshine breaking through small gaps in the trees and the expanse of a canyon, stretching out as far as I could see to the left and the right. At times, the soil on the trail was black, other times it had orange tints, and still other it glowed brilliantly red.

We passed countless waterfalls but we found the largest one when the trail opened up to a rocky shore next to the river about 2.5 miles in. Moss-draped cliffs towered above us as Jurgen (our friend who came to camp with us all the way from Germany) made his way out onto some rocks in the middle of the water above the falls. From that vantage point, you can see around a cliff to an even larger waterfall called Punchbowl Falls. He couldn't get over the beauty and declared, "We've reached the end of the earth. This is it! I could die now a happy man because we've seen the most beautiful place on earth."

This hike was day one of our ten-day camping trip. What a long list of adventures we've had! Obviously I wasn't able to blog from the depths of the wilderness but I'm back now and I'll spin you all my stories over the next few days.