Big Creek Falls below the Lewis River
— the green light under a hundred-foot fall.
Not only on a wall.
“Big Creek drops about a hundred and twenty-five feet through a basalt gorge in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, then runs another short stretch to its mouth on the Lewis River. The forest here is the wet kind of Pacific Northwest woods, west of the crest of the Cascades, where Douglas fir and western hemlock stand wrapped in moss and the understory is sword fern and devil's club. Access is off Forest Road 90, a short walk on the Big Creek Falls Trail to the railed overlook above the plunge pool. The water carries the cold of upper Skamania County all summer. After the first frost the vine maple turns the gorge orange against the dark fir.
Big Creek Falls below the Lewis 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.
Big Creek Falls is a single-drop waterfall of roughly a hundred and twenty-five feet on Big Creek, a tributary of the Lewis River in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Skamania County, southern Washington. The falls sit in the southern Washington Cascades, southeast of Mount St. Helens and west of Mount Adams, in the wet west-slope conifer forest that runs from the crest of the range down to the Columbia. Access is by Forest Road 90, the Lewis River Road, which leaves State Route 503 at Cougar and follows the Lewis upriver past the Lower, Middle, and Upper Lewis River Falls before reaching the Big Creek Falls trailhead. Big Creek itself rises in the high country northeast of the falls and joins the main Lewis a short distance below the plunge pool, on its way down to Swift Reservoir.
The Lewis River drainage falls roughly twenty-five hundred feet from its headwaters in the Mount Adams country to its junction with the Columbia at Woodland, and Big Creek is one of the steeper tributaries on that descent. The falls plunge in a single drop of about a hundred and twenty-five feet into a deep pool cut into Western Cascades basalt of late Tertiary age, then the creek braids out over a basalt step and joins the Lewis. The main river itself runs through the same kind of gorge upstream, where the Lower Lewis River Falls drop a full forty-three feet across the breadth of the river. Spring snowmelt from the high country drives the flow; by late summer the falls are slower but the pool stays cold.
Forest Road 90, the Lewis River Road, is the standard approach to the falls and is generally open from late spring through autumn; the upper sections are typically closed by snow from late November through April. The trail to the falls itself is short, about half a mile round trip on a graded path to a fenced overlook above the gorge. Spring brings the heaviest flow, when snowmelt from the Mount Adams country drives Big Creek hard. Mid-summer brings warm forest and the resin smell of Douglas fir at the trailhead. Late October turns the vine maple bright orange against the dark conifer. Steelhead and salmon migrate the lower Lewis River; the falls themselves are an absolute barrier, and the upper drainage holds resident trout only.