Tumalo Falls offers relief for the body and soul

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Tumalo Falls tumbles 97 feet down a scenic gorge less than 15 miles from Bend. The falls is one a series that can be viewed along a trail up Tumalo Creek in the foothills of the Cascades.Steve Dieffenbacher

September 03, 2009

By Steve Dieffenbacher

Mail Tribune

What is it about water that lifts the human spirit?

In "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," Annie Dillard's Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the landscape and wildlife along a stream in Virginia, she stands mesmerized again and again by water's power to move her. At times she sees it as only another seamless element in a terrain of rocks, trees and light that carries the poetry of the Book of Genesis — a divine, life-giving spirit moving across the current. At others, it is the destructive singularity of a spring flood brutally remaking the world by moving those rocks and uprooting those trees in muddy waves that cover the land.

Even in its most violent aspects, water is for her a distillation of spirit, an unwavering voice of the present issuing forth, refusing to be denied. For Dillard, poised on a bridge across any stream, there is only one way to look, upstream to face the liquid rush coming at her with the "live and intricate purities of time."

Perhaps this is what I yearn for, too, when I seek out waterfalls in these dog days when the earth seems exhausted, the land dry and baking under relentless, cloudless heat, the air heavy with the season's gathered dust, the streams running low like veins bled out.

Early September is the time, with its gradual diminishment of light, when my hope for something wild and reviving is most desperate, an urgency for a reminder of that spring buoyancy that's now reduced to a whisper. This is when I must go in search of torrents to restore my spirit.

Southern Oregon has its share of beautiful falls, Mill Creek Falls near Prospect in Jackson County, for instance, and in Douglas County, National Creek Falls on the Rogue River and the series of falls along the North Umpqua River that include Toketee and Watson falls.

But if you're willing to drive a bit farther, and perhaps even stay overnight, there's a series of falls less than 15 miles west of Bend that are among the most picturesque in the state. To reach the falls, you end up on Galveston Avenue as you leave the city (see Bill Sullivan's "100 hikes in the Central Oregon Cascades" for how to navigate through Bend to this street), go 9.8 miles to what becomes Skyliner Road, then turn onto gravel Road 4603 for 3.4 miles to reach Tumalo Falls, the first and most spectacular of a series of high-desert cataracts.

This is a postcard waterfall to compare with northern Oregon's signature Multnomah Falls just off I-84, except that its setting seems more secluded, although it is barely outside the city of Bend's watershed. The cascade from Tumalo Creek plunges 97 feet through a forest of ponderosa pine, Engelmann spruce, mountain hemlock, white pine and snowbrush to a gently rolling creekbed below. Follow the short 0.2-miles trail to a platform and you can gaze at the water from above as it leaps over the edge. From that perch, you can also see the low-lying forest downstream that is still recovering from the Bridge Creek fire that blackened six square miles in 1979.

But if you thirst for more, this short walk to Tumalo Falls can be just the start of a longer outing that will build in beauty. Follow the trail upstream another 0.8 miles, and you'll reach a 200-foot cliff where another cataract, Double Falls, can be seen churning its way downstream in two 20-foot drops. These falls, even in late summer, roil with a white froth as they plow through the narrow canyon.

And there's still more. Go another 0.9 miles up the trail and you reach Upper Falls, a 50-foot-tall torrent that descends into a shallow bowl.

Partly hidden by trees, this cataract will tantalize you with the desire to see it whole, but you never quite will, adding to its fascination.

Ambitious hikers can continue on to some smaller waterfalls on a 6.8-mile loop to Spring Creek, but Upper Falls is a good turnaround point for families or the less fit, adding up to 3.8 miles round trip.

For Annie Dillard, whose background included theological training, looking upstream at Tinker Creek was a spiritual experience. For her, the light on the water bore "from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end." She saw it as an incarnation, the "wind of the future" felt in the present.

And so it is with our Oregon creeks and waterfalls like Tumalo and its upstream sisters, seen in these dying days of summer when life seems most listless, our human spirit suspended, waiting for a word, any word to give us a reason to move forward.

As always, waterfalls plunge far upstream from our tired creeks when a resurgence seems most unlikely, and there wait for us, rushing undeterred, the mists of their descent sweeping through the air like a benediction. All we can do then is stand and gaze at them, breathing in their promise of change with a silent and grateful wonder.

Steve Dieffenbacher is a Mail Tribune page designer/copy editor. You can reach him at 776-4498 or sdieffenbacher@mailtribune.com

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