Eatonville: Little Mashel River Falls and Lower Falls Hike

My mom saw some posts on Instagram of some waterfalls near Eatonville and wanted to go hike out to them.  She gave me the job of finding out where they were and do some research on them.  One day while I was at grandma’s house using her WiFi, we still don’t have internet at our house yet, I checked a few hiking websites and the Visit Rainier site to see where to park and how long we would be walking to get to these places mom wanted to go.  There were two ways of getting there, the short way via Alder Cut Off (quarter of a mile if that) or the long way through the Pack Forest on Hwy 7 (5-ish miles roundtrip.)

The weather finally was decent, we’ve had some very poor July weather, and the temperature was in the upper 70’s to low 80’s.  We all dressed for the occasion.  Ben couldn’t come with us because he already committed to helping one of his friends with some wrestling stuff in Tenino. 

We got up around 9:30 and got ready for our day.  I tried to have most of my hiking stuff ready the night before so I didn’t have to scramble in the morning.  We had some cereal and bananas for breakfast.  Ben left around 10:30 as did I after I got everything I needed into the Escape.  I told him to have fun.  I headed out to Rainier and hoped that mom and dad were semi ready to go.

As I thought, they were still getting ready.  Oh well, it gave me some time to use the bathroom and sit for a bit.  Dad was playing around with the back deck by flipping over the worn out ones to the backsides, which weren’t that bad looking, so we wouldn’t die each time we tried to put the animals to bed or make dinner on the bbq.  At this point everyone was waiting for everyone.  We took the Escape because I didn’t want to take everything out of it to put it into another car.  Plus I needed gas.  We piled everyone inside with their stuff and some lunch and drove into Yelm for some gas at the Arco.

We were on our way to Eatonville.  In the last five years I’ve been to Eatonville a lot…between the fastpitch games when I coached, geocaching, driving through to Yakima and hanging out with Shauna, it’s gotta be close to 30 times or so.  When we got up the hill into Eatonville traffic got horrible.  We had to wait at the main intersection in town for a while.  I got to thinking to myself, I hope where we’re going is the right place.  Fingers crossed.

We started up the hill out of town and remembered that there was a cache at the Bud Blancher Trail I gotta go get for the Mount Rainier series.  This one was part of the third series that published July 1^st.  I will save that for the way back.  When we left Rainier, I had put the parking coordinates into the Nuvi so we wouldn’t miss the pullout it spoke about online.   The pullout was in sight and I’ve always seen vehicles here in the past and have always wondered why they were parked there.  Now I know after all these years.

We found a place to park.  I put my socks and hiking shoes on.  I told everyone to hide their valuables just in case.  They ate some of their food before we were ready to go.  We really weren’t sure where we were supposed to go so we followed a group of people to the middle trail.  Sure enough, the short trail led us to a hill that you had to use a rope to get down.  This reminded mom and I of the last hill we did together several years ago in Dupont when we were going after the pirate barge cache which is now archived. 

We all got down the rope to the trestle in one piece.  We laughed at mom as she came down just because we could and she made a fuss about it.  We took a few pictures and then meandered our way next to the river to the first waterfall, the Little Mashel River Falls, a 92 foot veiling horsetail falls. 

When we arrived, there were two ways to get down to the falls, down the rocks next to the falls or around down a small trail that took you to the river on the other side.  I took the rocks and mom and dad walked the trail down.  I took a few pictures with my phone of the falls until they arrived.  We spent at least 20 minutes here and finalized it with a selfie.

After that we walked along the river back towards the trestle.  We really didn’t have anything else planned while we were here.  All the other hikes from this area were day hikes ranging from 4.5-5 miles round trip.  We saw TomTom Falls was quite a hike from where we were.  If we were to do that we would have to research and to plan to do it.  We wandered around for a while and took a gravel road just to see where it went. 

Then we saw a large rock with FALLS and an arrow pointing to a well used trail.  I wonder where this goes.  How far?  What falls?  We took it and followed it.  We went down a very long hill to a fork in the road.  Which one do we take?  We took the one that went further down the hill.  We stopped at the bottom and a lady with two horses passed us.  I swore those horses would slip on those rocks and tumble down the hill but they didn’t.  I was in awe.

Dad worried we’d be gone all day or we would be walking really far without some direction.  So we had to convince him to keep walking.

We followed the trail to another junction but this time there were people resting on a downed log and I asked them how far the falls were (at this point you could hear them) and they said not far, just down this section of trail, it takes you right to it.  We thanked them and headed down.

We saw a sign that said Lower Falls.  I do not remember reading up on any falls in the area called that.  I found out later that this was officially the Lower Little Mashel Falls, which is a 39 foot segmented horsetail falls.  There were quite a few people hanging out down there.  I ate a snack and took a few pictures.  We were probably there for about a half hour or so enjoying the scenery.  We got a selfie before we headed back up the trail and dad made fun of me.

The walk back up was not as bad as I thought it would be.  We had to stop and take a few breaks here and there.  We got back to the trail head, walked the gravel road to the railroad tracks and back over the trestle.  The second part to our hike only took us an hour which wasn’t that bad.  We pulled ourselves up the hill and back to the Escape.  Mom got out our food.  She made sandwiches and I inhaled mine.  I am not a huge fan of sourdough but I ate it anyway.

We rode back down the hill into Eatonville and I stopped at the Bud Blancher Trail to show them the area and the bridge over the river but mostly to stop and get Rainier100 3:  This Bud’s For You (GC6KW0C).  We walked down to the river first and then grabbed the cache on the way back up.  It was getting hot and I was tired.  We did a lot of walking today.

We stopped in Yelm to get blizzards from Dairy Queen because mom insisted.  I got an Oreo cookie, mom got a Butterfinger and dad got an M&M one.  They tried to get me to take them to the store but I wanted to go home and get some stuff done before the work day tomorrow.  I dropped them off at their house and I went home.  Ben had finished the dishes and was washing laundry when I got home.  It was nice to get a shower and be clean.  The rest of the evening I got ready for work the next day.

Next Adventure:  #spottheape2016 and Floating Mayfield Lake