Daughter Susan and I parked about 9:45 at Multnomah Falls lodge and headed up the trail carrying our snowshoes as well as ice axes - just in case. We donned the snowshoes at the stone bridge and proceeded up the well-buried trail. As it turned out, knee pads might have been a useful addition as we found many large trees down across the trail between the stone bridge and the metal bridge that had us down on all fours in three or four spots! The above is a pic of the worst of it - 8 or nine large trees down in a short section.
The condition of the trail quickly deteriorated above the stone bridge:
Here's the only one we saw coming back down. We met a few more folks as we came back down ourselves and they all thanked us for the nice snowshoe tracks we left on the route:
Once at the first of the upper falls, the switchbacks were completely covered so going directly up the hill seemed to be the best option. Suz tackled this with her customary aplomb. (Her later descent - well, you will have to ask her about that!):
The section of trail near the top of the upper of the two upper falls was worthy of very careful negotiation:
Above the junction of the Wahkeenah Trail, many trees down and lots of crawling under and over was the rule:
Past the worse of it, we had the metal bridge in our sites:
The view of the carnage downstream from the metal bridge:
Above the bridge, no tracks at all were visible. We called it a day and headed back:
One last look at the winter wonderland as we arrived at the freeway entrance near Dodson:
dn & Suz
