Angel’s Rest Trail Day Hike, Oregon

This is a day hike to Angel’s Rest lookout (3km) and then my grandson (Light) and I adlibbed a bit (ok maybe a lot). It was Light’s first adventure with grandpa, but he had been well prepared by watching my 3 Minute Adventure videos. So, he should have known things would devolve.

easy

We set out from the Angel’s Rest parking lot/trailhead at 10am and reached the first falls and then Angle’s Rest lookout around 11am without too much drama (mostly a rocky zigzag uphill trail). We stopped to film, take photos and rest often.

Once at the lookout I asked if he wanted to return by the same route or do an additional 5.5kms to reach Wahkeena Spring. He agreed so we set out along the north face of the range in an easterly direction. This stretch presented a different terrain/forest trail and was very indirect.

We reached the spring about 2 hours later (much later than I had planned). We now had a problem. We had been on the trail for an actual total of 3 hours. It was now 1pm. I was expected to return Light (home) at 3pm (so needed to be at the trailhead parking lot at 2.30pm). How do we backtrack 3 hours in 1.5 hours?

The solution was to find a short-cut. So, we agreed to take a route to the highway via the Wahkeena trail down to the falls. This was a 2.6km winding steep downhill groomed trail that took us an hour of fast walking.

Once at the Wahkeena Falls parking area we needed to hoof it back to the Angle’s Rest parking lot via the road. It was now 2pm and we needed to cover 4.1km in 30 minutes. Impossible but we gave it a go.

We reached the car in 51 minutes, jumped in and tore off like an old bat out of hell;-) We made it back at 3.30pm (only an hour late) but all good, I had called ahead to warn Seth we would be late. He said that he’d expected as much!

Tadaaa.

Light and I had had our first adventure! He had opted to modified the plan with some adhoc choices based on circumstances (following the ‘no hard and fast rules in nature’ edict), he got to listen to a day of my stories and best of all, he covered over 16km (10 miles) of trail with over a 1000m of elevation and he didn’t complain once.

I can hardly wait to take him to Everest Base Camp.