Adventure To Ramona Falls!

Summer is officially over and that means getting into the mindset of nesting and preparing your home for colder weather. Traditionally fall is a great time to be a home buyer as the heavy competition during the summer months will cool down a bit and it is easier make your offers stand out to sellers.  

I'm not going to deny, sometimes it is a bit tough for me to let go of summer so I decided this year to have one last hiking adventure before the season officially changed. Thanks to a busy schedule I only had time for a day trip and I figured I would visit a waterfall I had never explored near Mount Hood - Ramona Falls. Obviously I took my camera with me and decided to share the results with all of you!  

As always, if you have any questions or comments, be sure to Contact Us and we will be happy to help!

As I mentioned earlier, the hike to Ramona Falls is located in the Mt. Hood National Forest. The hike is also good at presenting challenges. Within the first quarter mile the trail splits abruptly at the Sandy River with no bridge on which to cross. Fortunately there are a lot of spots like this one where one can shimmy across a fallen tree. The river is only about five feet deep and not too swift so a person like me could fall in and touch the bottom. Not life threatening, but not fun either should I slip into the water. Balancing across a fallen tree was easy enough, the only challenge being I had to do so with about twenty pounds of camera gear strapped to my back. 

The hike to the falls was roughly seven miles. That's a decent workout made more difficult by the fact that the entire path to Ramona Falls is a constant and steady elevation gain. After the first three miles you really start to notice! Fortunately when you are determined to make photographs you have plenty of excuses to stop along the way and rest for a bit. I was really attracted to this baby tree growing next to the fallen remains of its bigger brother.     

After hiking for several hours I finally made it to Ramona Falls only to discover the scene was really dark! Ramona Falls is nestles on the side of a cliff and very deep in the forest surrounded by very tall trees. So that meant I needed to make some very long exposures in order to capture the falls on film. Five minute exposures to be exact. In my first attempt another hiker walked into my frame (you can see him on the lower left) and hovered around for about a minute - just long enough to create a ghostly image in my photo. In the future I'm sure I'll be tempted to make up some story about a long lost hiker haunting the falls that mysteriously appears on my roll of film. ;-)

Once the other hiker moved along I decided to shift my tripod a bit closer to the falls to capture a bit more of the scale. My exposure time still hovered around five minutes long which is why the tree branches on the upper left appear a bit blurry. There was a steady breeze in the air and despite my insistence to the contrary mother nature didn't want to keep things still. Even though it is is not technically perfect as a result I'm still fond of this image.