Trail conditions note: We couldn't find the trail that connected the trailhead to the river, but the Lewis River trail itself is in great shape. See below.
For a brother/sister backpacking weekend, my sister wanted "gently rising shady forest", and the Lewis River trail delivered.
* Our plan had been to leave one car at the Lower Falls Campground, but as other reports noted, there's a section of dirt road just over 1 mile south of the Lower Falls Campground that's steep and rutted. We saw numerous small cars struggling to get up the slope, and decided not to risk it.
* The trailhead location given by the WTA is for the "Speed" trailhead. On USGS maps and Gaia (see link), this point is indicated as the start of a short trail down to the Lewis River. We could not find a trail corresponding to what is shown on USGS or Gaia maps. We did find a trail at the start, but this did not correspond directly to the trail on the maps. We very quickly came to a large washout with many downed trees. We were uncomfortable crossing the washout, so tried to hike around. We couldn't pick up the trail again, so tried to use our GPS to pick up the mapped trail. We crossed over the line on the map multiple times, and could never find the mapped trail. We did see faint evidence of past hikers, so either other people have struggled like we did, or else we were seeing remnants of a very old trail. There were countless blowdowns of huge trees whose rotting trunks were challenging to cross. We eventually gave up and returned to the road.
* We walked along the road to the bridge about 1 mile south of the campground. From there we picked up the Lewis River trail, which is easy and well-traveled.
* The Lower Falls Campground page on recreation.gov indicates that most of the campsites are only available on a walk-up basis. This does not seem to be true: the campground was nearly packed, and the few empty sites were all reserved. We asked some people how they had made reservations, and they indicated that they had done so over the phone a few days before coming.
* We backtracked a bit, and found a nice campsite along the river.
* The second night we camped just above Taitnapum Falls, a bonus waterfall above Upper Falls. Some earlier campers had left an unusual campsite amenity behind: tiki torches.
Aside from the connecting trail, the Lewis River trail was an extremely pleasant, easy walk, with many nice views of the river.
Comments
Looks like a great trip. July 27th is getting pretty late in the year for that much open flame.
Posted by:
The Miser on Jan 04, 2019 10:36 AM