Silver falls state park in Oregon has been on my photography bucket for years now, but we’re always either on our way out to the desert or it’s so close to home that we bypass it entirely.  However since we were out by the coast anyway, it was convenient to just head east for a few hours (in an attempt to avoid the rain!) to spend the night outside the park and hit it up first thing the next morning.  I know I’m a bit of a lazy photographer and never want to get up for sunrise, so this time I set my alarm clock for 6:00 because I was going to do this one right, dammit! It was nice because we got to the park before it opened and had most of the waterfalls completely to ourselves for a few hours.  Unfortunately, the falls all face North, so there was never going to be a nicely lit sunrise or sunset anywhere near them.  It did end up working out that the lighting was super soft and I could use a long shutter speed to blur the water like I wanted. Overall it was more than worth spending the night in the woods in the pounding rain!

We started at North falls.  I didn’t realize it, but this is one that you can walk behind! Super cool!

Here’s north falls from the lookout

We also took the little trail to upper north falls.  It was also very pretty, but I couldn’t get as close as I wanted due to water spraying onto the lens of my camera!

We hit up winter falls next.  The view of this one is obstructed by a super awkward tree stump, but to get in front of it there was water alllll over my camera, so that didn’t work.  I also didn’t want to hike down to the creek and stand in it to get a photo, so I didn’t get any pictures of this one at all.  To make matters worse, Jason rolled his ankle on the trail back up so any more longer hiking was out of the picture.  Since most of the falls are down a few mile trail, we had to bypass them for now.  That just left the last easily accessible waterfall: south falls. This is the main trailhead and by far and away the most popular place in silver falls.  If you want to not have crowds at this iconic viewpoint, hit this one up first! By the time we got here the crowds had rolled in so between that and jason’s ankle, we didn’t bother hiking down to walk behind the waterfall.  Next time!

Overall, Silver Falls State Park was pretty amazing.  I knew it was going to be, just based on the pictures I’ve seen of it.  Being able to walk behind the falls was a bonus! I would love to go back sometime!