Columbia River Gorgeous: Horsetail Falls

If I had to be stuck in one single spot in the United States for the rest of my life, you can bet your begonias that it would be the Columbia River Gorge. My friend Don took me here during my first trip to Oregon when I was in grad school, and I absolutely fell in love with it. So when Layne asked if I would be up for a day trip to Portland, since she hadn't had the chance to explore it yet, I jumped at the chance to show her the city--and the Gorge.  For one day, we switched our tourist-and-tour-guide roles! 

There's no way I could condense our visit to the Gorge into a single blog post--even though we were only there for a few hours--because I love it that much, so I decided to break it down into it's own series. Since we didn't have much time, we decided to stick mostly to the waterfalls that were close to the scenic highway and the Vista House at Crown Point (another blog post!), but the one exception was the short hike that started at Horsetail Falls.

Horsetail Falls is a great introduction to the Gorge. It's impressive enough to be mesmerizing as a first waterfall, but you wouldn't want to end here after seeing Multnomah or (my favorite, so far) Latourell Falls. There's a viewpoint right off the road--you'll park  on the other side and walk across while catching a peek through the trees--and you can walk right down to the rocks below the falls.

See? Mesmerizing, right? This is also the trailhead for the Ponytail Falls (upper Horsetail Falls) and scenic overlook trail--which we hiked immediately after. More about that soon!