Spring Break at the Falls

Spring break this year was going to be filled with first and foremost...spring cleaning (much to my children's chagrin) and after the work, not much else. We planned one outing for Wednesday to go to Mt. St. Helens with our friends the Morgans since the destination is relatively close and we've never been. But the night before, Stephanie called to say Mt. St. Helens was still closed. Of all things! We hadn't anticipated that. Stephanie wanted to go to Silver Falls on Friday but the weather didn't look as promising on Friday as it did Wednesday, so that's what we decided to do instead.

The weather was fabulous. We made it down there around 11am and began the outing with a picnic lunch. As we were leaving to go on our hike, everyone and their dog started coming into the area for lunch. Our timing was just right.

Unfortunately, in order to get our parking permit, for $5, we had to pay in cash. I NEVER have cash, but miraculously had $15...one 5 dollar bill and one 10 dollar bill. Stephanie had no cash. I was behind her and told her I'd pay for her, no problem, except when I got up there, I discovered that a 5 dollar bill was the largest bill the machine would take (I'm sorry, that's just dumb) as there was no attendant manning the entrance to the park. So I paid for mine with the $5 and we decided to see if we could break my $10 into smaller bills later at one of the stations. After eating lunch, we hiked to one of the posts before we hit the trail and about 30 minutes later, Stephanie had her day pass and we were on our way to South Falls.

I don't have a very sturdy stroller and I wasn't thrilled about navigating one on the trail, so I put 26 pounds of Calvin on my back. My goodness he's heavy!Thankfully, the other three kiddos can walk carefully on the trail, as long as I can hold Karcyn's hand. Here's a picture of them before we had to focus more on where our feet go than taking pictures as we headed down to the back side of the waterfall.


After we got past the waterfall and down to the bridge, Karcyn's poor bladder got slammed by the rushing of the "big water" and succumbed to her first wet accident since being potty trained 2 months ago. That kind of put a damper on things, so to speak. And since we still had to corral and herd eight kids and haul our own selves back UP to where we started, we cut the trip short with the one waterfall.

But...it was worth it.

Just to see this: