Silver Falls — Trail of Ten Falls

Ten waterfalls in a single canyon loop, and four of them you walk clean behind, with the water falling in a curtain right in front of your face. That's the promise of the Trail of Ten Falls, a full seven-and-a-half-mi…

One summer afternoon in 1928, better than a thousand people packed shoulder to shoulder along this very rim, hats off, leaning out over the drop to watch a man go over South Falls in a homemade boat. His name was Al F…

The headliner everybody drives out here to see drops 177 feet in one clean, unbroken ribbon, straight down with no tiers and no second thoughts into a deep green plunge pool below. South Falls leaves the ledge as a sm…

Look straight down and the whole forest floor has gone green. Tall, feathery sword fern crowds both edges of the path, each frond fitted with a tiny green thumb at the base of every leaflet, like a row of daggers; mix…

The ground tips over the edge here, the trail folding back on itself in switchbacks as it carries you off the plateau and down into the gorge. With every turn the air cools a few degrees on your skin and the light goe…

Ninety-three feet of water pours off the lip in one broad, unbroken sheet, and the path doesn't stop short of it. The trail curls right in beneath the rock overhang at Lower South Falls, so for a few steps the whole c…

Brush a hand along the trail's edge here and you're touching the canyon's pantry. The shoulder-high shrubs crowding in feed half the gorge: big fuzzy maple-shaped leaves mark thimbleberry, whose flat red fruit falls a…

The creek's voice suddenly doubles here, because you're standing at the low point of the whole canyon, where Silver Creek finally puts itself back together. The South Fork carved its gorge coming down one side, the No…

The roar drops off and the trees get taller, into the kind of forest that takes five hundred years to make. Towering Douglas fir and western hemlock rise alongside shaggy, fragrant red cedar, some of these firs standi…

Crouch to knee-height, where the light filters down dim and green, and you've timed it: this is where spring lives in the canyon. Trillium leads the show, three broad leaves and a single white flower that doesn't just…

These canyon walls lean in green and wet, but climb to the foothills above and the country was once wide open: rolling oak savanna and grass prairie you could see clear across, dotted with great lone oaks. That was th…

Reach up and touch one of the pale-green tufts dangling from the branch overhead. It's not a plant and it isn't decay; it's lichen, two living things sharing one body, a fungus building the structure and a green alga…

Thirty feet off a low shelf, and suddenly the falls come fast: Lower North Falls is the opener to a tight run packed into a short stretch of the North Fork, what you might call waterfall alley, where one drop is nearl…

The tallest waterfall in the entire park is the one most people never turn aside to see. Double Falls drops 178 feet at the dead end of a little box canyon up a side gulch, taller than the famous headliner, taller tha…

You could walk right past this one and never know it. Drake Falls slips down a dark step of rock below a small wooden platform, just 27 feet, the shortest drop on the whole loop and the only one with no trail swinging…

That skinny 27-foot ribbon you just walked past, the one that barely makes a sound against its big shouting cousins, carries the name a whole life is hung on: Drake. June Drake, a photographer out of Silverton born in…

One hundred and six feet of water slides off the rim in a single clean ribbon, narrow and graceful, fanning a little wider near the bottom where it finally hits the pool. Watch the top of Middle North Falls: the creek…

There's a neighbor along this stretch of North Fork you'll never meet if you keep moving. Watch the black rocks where the current shatters white and you may catch a slate-gray bird no bigger than a robin, bobbing up a…

Crouch at the water's edge where the North Fork goes glassy over gravel, and watch for a shadow holding steady against the current, nose upstream, spending nothing: a coastal cutthroat trout, the only trout that belon…

Two ribbons instead of one, side by side: that's Twin Falls, thirty-one feet of North Fork Silver Creek split clean in two by a lump of rock right at the brink. The creek meets it, can't decide, and goes around both s…

Let your ears do the walking here, because this stretch climbing toward the next falls is the best place on the whole loop to pull the forest's voices apart. Sound behaves oddly in the canyon: the walls and hanging gr…

Those pale gilled caps pushing up through the bark of a rotting log are only the fruit; the real organism runs underneath you, threaded through the whole forest floor. Crouch and catch that dark, earthy, almost sweet…

That bright yellow thing inching across the wet leaves, long as your finger and slick as a peeled banana, is a banana slug, turning the fallen forest into soil one mouthful at a time, alongside coiled millipedes and b…

The grandest walk-behind of them all fills the back wall of an amphitheater: North Falls, 136 feet of North Fork water hurling itself off the rim, and the path carries you in under it, the whole falls thundering off y…

The trail splits here, and most folks bear left and start climbing for the rim. Don't, not yet. The short spur off to the right runs just a few minutes out to Upper North Falls, the last waterfall down at the bottom o…

Sixty-five feet at the back of a side canyon all its own, tucked away like a secret the creek's been keeping: Upper North Falls is the ninth and last waterfall down in the gorge, with only Winter Falls still ahead on…

The roar falls away behind you and the trail goes flat and easy: you've topped out on the rim, on top of the canyon you spent all morning climbing out of. Off to your left the gorge is just a green crease in the earth…

Run a hand along the edge of one of these stone steps and the cold of it tells you something: every cut block you climbed out of the canyon on was set by hand, likely by a hungry boy. This tale belongs to the Civilian…

Hold a hand out palm-up and feel it: even when it isn't raining, the air here is heavy, cool, faintly wet against your skin. That's the whole secret of this place, and up on the open rim you can finally feel its size.…

The tenth and final falls of the loop earns its name by keeping a calendar. Winter Falls leaps 134 feet off the far rim across the gorge, fed by a small side creek instead of the main stream, so it lives and dies by t…

All day this water has done the loudest thing it knows, the roar you stood under, the mist on your face, drop after drop off the basalt, and every bit of it is bound somewhere on a far longer trip than you'd guess. Th…

This level, easy ground was nearly something else entirely. Back in the 1920s and 30s there was a real push to make Silver Falls a national park in its own right, serious enough that the federal government sent an ins…

On this last stretch down toward the day-use area, this tale asks you to unsee the forest entirely, to strip the trees away and stand up bare stumps as far as you can look, smoke off a mill, a rutted dirt road, and a…

Ten waterfalls, and four of them you didn't just look at, you walked behind: South, the two Lowers, Double, Drake, Middle North, Twin, North, Upper North, and Winter. Not many trails on this earth let you do that, and…