Sahalie Falls

Living in Oregon, we are privileged to be surrounded by so much nature. I absolutely love all the beauty around here. It makes it nice because Troy and I both really enjoy hiking and when we want to take a break from life, we go for a hike.

The day after Christmas, Troy woke me up and asked if I wanted to get out of town for the day. I’d been planning on sleeping really late, but I guess 9am is decent sleeping in time. Especially since I get up at 6am on weekdays and 8:30 on weekends. So, I wasn’t to unhappy about not being able to sleep in. And our hike more than made up for the missed sleep.

About two hours away from where we live there is a place called Sahalie Falls. What was neat about the drive was that it was a decently warm day when we left Salem, but when we got up closer to the hike, we started seeing a lot of snow. I was super excited about that and really happy that I’d chosen to wear a beanie and had snagged my fingerless gloves. Troy was happy when I told him I’d brought them, too. Here are some shots I took from the car as we drove up to Sahalie Falls. Don’t worry, Troy was driving. 🙂

The hike itself was really pretty, too. The Sahalie Falls trail is a fairly easy 2.6 mile loop hike on the McKenzie River inside the Willamette National Forest. It’s easy enough that we saw a lady in a wheelchair being pushed along the path. Of course, she couldn’t do the entire path because the path gets bumpy and it was pretty muddy, but she still could have gone pretty far. This is what a lot of the hike was like. Super pretty and not too strenuous.

After walking for a few minutes, we came upon the first waterfall: Sahalie Falls. Sahalie is a Chinook slang word that means ‘Heaven’. It started getting foggy shortly after we got there, so there was a bit of a haze the entire time we were there. It was still quite beautiful.

There were quite a few people at the first waterfall and not a lot of room to get a good view of the falls, so we didn’t stay there long. We wandered down the path a ways and found a nice little viewing platform that allowed us to get some great shots of the river. We didn’t stay too long, though, because it was really cold out and the longer we stood in one spot, the colder we got. My poor fingers felt like they were going to fall off at one point. lol. Thank goodness for pockets!

It was really funny because Troy climbed up on top of the brick barrier and was jumping from side to side to get good shots. There was a guy watching him who was cracking up. I wish I’d taken some pictures of Troy doing that. It was pretty funny. When *I* climbed up to get some better shots, I was very careful NOT to act like an antelope because knowing my luck, I would have either dropped Troy’s camera or fallen in the water. Neither of which would have been fun.

A fter walking down the path a little bit further, maybe about 10-15 minutes, we got to the second waterfall, Koosah Falls. Koosah is a Chinook slang word that means ‘Sky’.

We went about 10 minutes past Koosah Falls and were going to go all the way to Carmen Reservoir and back around the other side, but we ran into a lady who told us about Blue Pool and said that we could get some really beautiful shots from there. So, we booked it back down the trail and followed her directions to that hike. You can see my pictures from that hike here.

On the way back, though, I stopped to take some pictures of the fog that had been hanging around all day and capture a bit of a pretty rainbow that was extending over the river. We both really enjoyed this hike and I’m glad Troy woke me up earlier than I’d wanted to get up so that we could do this hike. And I’m really happy that that lady told us about Blue Pool. We ended up having a really great day and it really rejuvenated us to spend the day hiking around and getting away from regular life for a while.

Have you been on any good hikes recently?