Koosah Falls McKenzie River
— — water the colour of the sky before snow.
Not only on a wall.
“A wide curtain of the upper McKenzie River dropping about seventy feet over a basalt shelf, half a mile downstream from Sahalie Falls. The name means sky in the Chinook trade language, and the pool below holds that cold, pale blue all year. A short loop trail through old-growth Douglas fir and western hemlock connects the two falls; in winter the spray ices the railings and the moss along the riverbank turns the deep green that only Oregon rainforest reaches. The river runs full every month. from the studio
Koosah Falls McKenzie River, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Koosah Falls sits on the upper McKenzie River in Linn County, Oregon, inside the Willamette National Forest about half a mile downstream from Sahalie Falls. The waterfall drops roughly 70 feet over a curved basalt shelf laid down by Cascade lava flows around 6,000 years ago, when the eruptions that built nearby Sand Mountain dammed the river and reshaped its course. The name Koosah comes from Chinook Jargon, the regional trade language, and means sky, a reference to the colour of the plunge pool. Access is from Oregon Route 126, the McKenzie Highway, about 20 miles east of the town of McKenzie Bridge.
The McKenzie above Koosah is fed largely by Clear Lake, six miles upstream, which is itself fed by springs from the porous lava of the High Cascades. That spring-fed source keeps the river running cold and clear and remarkably steady through the year; flow does not swing the way it does on snowmelt rivers. The plunge pool below the falls reads as pale blue because the volcanic sediment is minimal and the depth is real. The basalt shelf at the lip is curved, so the water leaves it as a single wide curtain rather than a focused chute, and the spray reaches the railings on cold mornings.
The Waterfalls Loop Trail, about 2.6 miles round trip, connects Sahalie Falls and Koosah Falls along both banks of the McKenzie. The trail is paved between the upper viewpoints and dirt along the river. Sahalie sits 0.4 miles upstream from Koosah and drops about 100 feet; the two are commonly photographed as a pair. The Willamette National Forest manages the site and there is no admission fee, though a Northwest Forest Pass is required at the trailhead lot. The road stays open year-round, but ice on the railings is common from November through March, and the spray makes footing slick.