Pregled posta

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Posting this shot is worth the story alone. This was taken in Oneonta Gorge last month during a particularly chilly bout of cold weather which froze many of the area's waterfalls. For those not familiar with this gorge, it is a popular spot during the hot summer months. The gorge itself is an extremely narrow canyon that is only about 1/4 of a mile long but requires wading, sometimes up to one's chest through pools of water to reach. It is quite impossible to hike up this canyon without wading.

During the summer this is great, the canyon is shaded and always about 15 degrees cooler and the cold water is quite refreshing. Crowds of people churn up this canyon on weekends, making photography frustrating but cooling off quite enjoyable.

About once a year we get a cold snap that is cold enough and long enough to turn the many waterfalls of the Columbia River Gorge into winter wonderlands. It is one of my favorite times of year. It is hard to imagine enjoying as much discomfort as this weather brings. Painfully chilled faces and hands, pants and fleeces coated in ice to the point that you crack when you walk. Spray from the waterfalls coating your cameras and freezing solid. Hurried trips back to the car to regain feeling in your extremities before venturing out for "just a few more pictures".

In other words, bliss.

I make a point of getting out here every year. So I have spent a fair amount of time at most of the main waterfalls over the past few winters. But this one had always seemed a little to crazy to attempt. Afterall, it requires wading, and during this time of year, getting wet for that long would result in frostbite at the least and even hypothermia. Probably hypothermia. I will go through a lot in pursuit of amazing scenes like this, but I think I draw the line at hypothermia. Just sounds overrated if you ask me.

The idea of making it up this gorge somehow to see this falls was awfully tempting still. A few of us talked about it and brainstormed ideas. The most popular was to buy an inflatable raft and pump it up and use it to cross the pools. The big problem with this is that there is a giant logjam at the mouth of this gorge that one has to climb over in order to enter the gorge itself. So any raft would have to be inflated on site, and it ruled out bringing in a canoe or kayak.

Then a stroke of inspiration was lent to me on a comment to a photo I posted some time ago, to rent a drysuit. A ha. Even more fortunate, I did not have to rent one, a friend likes to surf and scuba dive and owns a drysuit. Even better, we are almost the same size. So the cold snap hit, I got a day off work, naturally I called him right away and got my hands on a drysuit. All that stood before me then was a giant frozen logjam and a quarter mile of ice cold water.

The fun begins.

My first task was wading across the shallow stream to reach the logjam, which required me donning the drysuit. I had to repeatedly take it on and off as needed because I did not want to trip, or snag it on a log and tear it. But as an additional wrinkle I did not have waterproof boots to put over the feet of the drysuit. Even though the entire suit is waterproof, I did not want to walk across rocks in just the suit and risk damaging the feet. So I pulled on an old pair of my hiking boots to protect the feet. They worked well to that extent but of course got soaked the moment I stepped in the water. Which basically made them like little freezers on my feet.

The suit kept out the water, not the cold.

By the time I got across the first stream, which only took 2-3 minutes, and was never deeper than mid-calf, I could not feel my toes. So I had to sit down, take off the suit, pack it up, and hold my toes until I was certain they were still going to talk to me. Then on to the logjam. Unfortunately I hit another unexpected snag here too. Right before the logjam are two giant boulders that sit right in the middle of the stream. There are two basic choices, you can go left around them, in the tight space between them and the cliff walls. You just wedge yourself in, back to the wall and hands and feet on the nearest boulder and crab walk along, suspended over a deep little pool of water. Or you go right, which requires wading through a fairly deep pool of water and pulling yourself up on a chest-high shelf of rock onto the second boulder. Well a small waterfall had turned the left hand cliff into a sheet of ice, there was no way I would get any traction on it, even with Yaktrax on my feet. The pool on the right was doable with the drysuit, but I did not want to have to climb the jagged shelf of rock in it, again afraid I would puncture or damage the suit. So I had to climb the first boulder and jump the four foot gap down to the second boulder, with all my gear attached. I did not think too much on how I was going to get out on my return trip...

This mini-adventure brought me to the logj

Mini wet bar area has maple cabinets, laminate flooring, pot lighting, deep sink, and space for a bar fridge and chest freezer. The bar is also wired for a microwave on separate circuit (on microwave shelf).