15 miles of hiking • 4500' elevation gain •
Contrived loop to break in some new shoes. Started at Angel's Rest TH at 4:15pm (!), up to Angel's Rest by 5, then traversed to Wahkeena Springs and went down the falls trail (which is actually kind of cool until it becomes paved) back to the Old Columbia Highway, then took the connector trail to Multnomah Falls Lodge, went up to the top of the falls and up the Larch Mtn trail until it meets the Wahkeena trail, then back on the Wahkeena trail until the junction with the #420C trail to Devil's Rest. I've never been up there before, and I reached the summit at 8pm (!) to some nice orange light filtering through the trees onto the summit rocks. I ran down the continuation of the trail, racing the setting sun, to reach Angel's Rest in a half hour and caught some wonderful sunset colors on the northern horizon (note to self: there are no people on Angel's Rest at 8:30pm! solitude!), then mostly ran back down to the car in darkness holding a headlamp (lower light angle = more definition of rocks in the trail), and finished slightly past 9pm, a little under 5 hours total. Kind of a speed evening hike. No camera = no pictures.
Funniest thing was running into this bizarre guy going up the Wahkeena Falls trail as I was going down - he asks me if the Multnomah Falls Lodge is at the top of the trail (???), and I tell him no, it's back down at the river and a little to the east, and he's very confused - he says the signs at the bottom said the Lodge was up this trail! So we both jog back down to Wahkeena Falls and he looks at the sign on the connector trail and tells me he doesn't want to go to Multnomah Falls, he wants to go to the Lodge, and I'm like, dude, the Lodge is at the bottom of the falls. He took off and I never saw him again. Apparently he was supposed to meet his wife at the Lodge, but he didn't have a car at Wahkeena and I have no idea how he got on that trail. Raaaaaandom.
