South Falls of Silver Falls in autumn
— — a curtain of water with a path behind it.
Not only on a wall.
“South Falls drops 177 feet over a basalt lip into a basin of mossed rock and bigleaf maple. The Trail of Ten Falls passes behind the curtain through an old amphitheatre worn into softer rock under the ledge. In October and early November the maples along Silver Creek turn yellow and orange, and the spray off the falls catches the colour on the way down. The forest floor is sword fern and damp duff. The water sounds bigger from the path behind it than from the rim above.
South Falls of Silver Falls in autumn, 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.
South Falls is the most-photographed of the ten waterfalls on Silver Creek in Silver Falls State Park, about twenty-six miles east of Salem in the foothills of the Oregon Cascades. The falls drops 177 feet over a Columbia River Basalt ledge that erupted roughly fifteen million years ago and now caps a softer, older sediment layer. The undercut behind the curtain, worn into that softer rock, lets the Trail of Ten Falls pass directly behind the falling water. Silver Falls is the largest state park in Oregon at about 9,200 acres, established by the state in 1933.
Autumn in the Silver Creek canyon turns the bigleaf maples a clear yellow and the vine maples a deeper red, against the dark green of Douglas fir and western hemlock. Peak colour in the canyon usually falls in the third and fourth weeks of October, depending on the year's first cold nights. By early November the leaves are down on the trail and the falls run heavier as the rains return. The water volume of South Falls climbs through autumn and winter and tapers through summer; by September the curtain narrows enough to walk behind without much spray.
South Falls is reached from the South Falls Day-Use Area on Highway 214, with parking, a lodge built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1940s, and access to the Trail of Ten Falls. Day-use parking is five dollars per vehicle as of 2026. The short loop to South Falls is about a mile and a half with a 200-foot descent into the canyon and the path behind the falls; the full Trail of Ten Falls is roughly 7.2 miles. The trail can be slick in autumn rain, and the path behind the falls is always wet.