Silver Falls State Park

Silver Falls State Park has been recommended to us over and over again. The park is about an hour and a half south of Portland and is supposed to be beautiful, but also very popular. As usual, we didn’t plan far enough in advance to get a reservation. We arrived around 7:30 pm and got the very last spot available. However, this spot was their “emergency overflow” spot and they would only let us stay there for one night. We would know the next afternoon if there was a cancelation and we could stay a second night. We took Rudy for a walk, made dinner, and got some sleep. If we were only going to have one night at Silver Falls we would need to make the most of our day on Saturday.

On Saturday morning we went for a lovely nature hike just outside of the campground. Silver Falls is well known for the Trail of Ten Falls which, as the name suggests, takes you by ten different waterfalls. We were really looking forward to this hike, but didn’t realize that it was not dog friendly. I don’t know if they have deemed it unsafe for dogs or if they have banned dogs to help preserve the trail. Either way, we had Rudy with us and decided to save the big hike for another trip. Our nature hike was still pretty fantastic.

On the way back from our nature hike I found a play ground and felt compelled to let my inner child out a bit. Monkey bars are more difficult than I remember.

While we were eating lunch a super friendly and helpful park ranger stopped by to let us know that there had been a cancelation and we would have a spot for the night! I like to think that we have good camping karma. We try our best to be nice to everyone we meet and things always seem to work out for us. Our new spot was on the other side of the campground and was absolutely perfect. The park ranger told us it was the best spot they had. We had plenty of space to spread out and there was a peaceful river running right behind our site. For future reference, always reserve site 72.