Repugnantly over-visited and overcrowded describes the Waterfalls Scenic Corridor in the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area. For the experience of waiting in a line of parked cars to register with the ranger at the kiosk for your appointed one-hour timed entry slot, booked ahead for $2 on Recreation.gov, you are entitled to drive to each scenic parking lot, wait for a parking space to open up, park, walk to the Falls Viewpoint, look at lots of people’s backsides and try not to get clobbered by Selfie sticks while in line for your turn for a Selfie with the named waterfall in the background, pose and click, walk back, then dodge incoming cars to get back in your car and drive to the next photo op. In 2018 I took a tour bus to these spots while JG read guidebooks with Marco. That’s how I know what takes place at each of five Falls Viewpoints. It’s densely crowded, yet visitors want to pretend that they alone are posing in front of the falls. It’s like going to Disneyland and imagining you have a private rendezvous with Mickey, without all those fat interlopers barfing Pineapple Whip after Space Mountain. Unlike in Yosemite, where the scenery is everywhere you turn, waterfalls’ viewpoints concentrate the foot traffic to one little overlook. But it looks like a Brueghel the Younger peasant scene, not a landscape by Caspar David Friedrich.
Why write about what we didn’t see? I am a caretaker and cheerleader for wild places. I used to believe that getting more people to hang out in nature would result in more people respecting natural forces and becoming more attentive stewards of the earth. Now I think time in this National Scenic Area is just one more commodity to be bought, queued up for, and posted about.
JohnandJanet'sJourney 