Gifford Pinchot National Forest is home to Mount St. Helens (which is a huge volcano!) This 1,368,300 acre of land is home to forests, mountains, rivers, waterfalls, river valleys, wilderness, and more volcanoes! It’s a great place to check out!
This National Forest, like many others offer many overlooks right off the road so if you didn’t want to do any serious hiking, you can still take great shots right from the road. There are also easy day hikes offered in the park also.
My Highlight
Lower Falls:
Lower falls is a series of falls. There is lower, middle and upper. I heard the lower was the best and this is the only one I did. So I don’t know what middle and upper falls looks like.
I do know this. Lower falls was gorgeously amazing! And… this is
something I did not know. You can jump off of it! This was not planned for me!!!!
So I walk up to the falls like I normally do. Camera ready in hand, wondering what the falls were going to look like and BAM! This guy leaps off the waterfall and SPLASH right into the cold water underneath. I know it is cold water because later on I did it. So I take my pictures and where I’m at, I am looking at this waterfall with a gorge between us.
So I wander down the trail, to the river, across it (where you need to go if you want to jump off), walked right to where the boy jumped from and pretty much there I went.
I had my clothes on, camera in hand and everything. I was not prepared nor ready to jump and I just did it. My camera is waterproof so I just wrapped it around my hand and went. When I made it to the bottom, which was a rush, I realized that I could have had my camera on for that.
Damn! Why didn’t I think of turning my camera on for that jump. And as difficult as it was to gather up the courage and strength, I did it again, and this time with the camera on. Pretty cool. I just let go of everything. Every fear, every doubt and every worry. I just went!
Thank God I’m Ok! I had no one up there with me. All I saw was a guy do it from across a gorge! When I did it, there was no one standing up there with me. And it was hard to tell where he jumped from.
“Did he jump from here?”
“Oh wait no, was it from over there?”
“Screw it! Here I go!”
Damn, the water was cold! It was a shock to jump, a shock to know your ok and a shock of the cold water. Plus you couldn’t reach the bottom and it was quite a swim to get where you can touch. I loved it!
Here’s the glorious video. So I thought wiping the camera lens off would be a good idea. It wasn’t. I made it worse. So when you see a huge smudge on the left part of the camera. Whoops! That was my bad!
Lower falls was great, but this park is so huge and it offers so much more! I highly recommend checking this place out. You can even crawl through lava tubes here! Not at lower falls but probably only 45 minutes away from the falls. The park is big, so it takes a little bit to get from place to place. 🙂 Here is a map of the area if interested.
I hope you enjoyed this article! Thank you for reading!
If you want to visit their website it’s right here… http://www.fs.usda.gov/giffordpinchot/
Thank you for reading!
Sincerely,
Shelly/Livingonthedirt
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