Angel's Rest

I am beyond happy that we hopped in the car on a Tuesday afternoon to go on a hike. We've both been so busy with work lately that it felt so good getting out again. It had been a month since our last hike, yikes! We both love our jobs, but we both love trees, dirt, water, waterfalls, and views, too. Lucky for us, the Columbia Gorge has all those and more :) Yesterday, we hiked up to Angel's Rest and WOW, it was a blast! It's a 5 mile in and out hike, with a 270* view of the gorge once you reach the top. We gained 1450 ft in elevation over those 2.5 miles to the top, whew! It may have been a short distance, but it sure was steep.

Before heading up the trail for Angel's Rest we quickly hiked up the .2 mile trail to lower Latourell Falls, where I played around with some settings on my new DSLR camera (which I LOVE, in case you were wondering). Half the photos in this post were taken with my Canon, the other half our iPhones.


After that quick little detour, we headed up to Angel's rest!

We could hear this waterfall from the trail, but couldn't see it. Turns out it's called Upper Coopey Falls (we have no idea where lower Coopey Falls was because we never saw it) but, those willow tree roots are hard to miss with their hot pink color! We thought someone had spray painted the roots at first, but turns out that's actually natural.



The hiking trail was beautiful, it had a lot of things to look at and quite a few spots where you could wander down to the creek and play. We bought these water filtering straws a little while back and finally remembered to bring one along as we hiked. We drank right from the stream with the filter and it was awesome!






It's a good thing this little guy showed up because we had an hour to kill before sunset. So while we waited, we fed nearly an entire granola bar to this chipmunk. How could you not?? He was too cute.