Chocolate Falls (MSH) is dry!

General discussions on hiking in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest
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Chip Down
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Joined: November 8th, 2014, 8:41 pm

Chocolate Falls (MSH) is dry!

Post by Chip Down » June 19th, 2019, 9:05 pm

I was shocked to see that there will be no Chocolate Falls on St Helens this summer. It's a significant landmark along the Loowit Trail, at the bottom of the Wormflows route, where the trail from Marble Mountain meets Loowit.

The weird thing is, this isn't a drought year. Sure, there are places in the cascades where snowpack is < normal, but not so severely that you'd expect this creek to be dry. There's plenty of snow up there, but the melt is seeping through, and emerging way below Chocolate.
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Looking down from the top of dry Chocolate Falls.

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teachpdx
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Joined: January 21st, 2014, 4:45 pm
Location: Hillsboro, OR

Re: Chocolate Falls (MSH) is dry!

Post by teachpdx » June 20th, 2019, 2:32 pm

Surprisingly, much of the state of Washington is actually in a moderate to severe drought. See link to map below.

https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentM ... or.aspx?WA

But that cannot be the complete explanation... I'm sure that the young geology on MSH is unsettled enough to create changes like this, allowing the water to travel underground.
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