GOING DOWN with the DEVIL

Photographer Tim Giraudier shares a glimpse of his trek to Devil’s Staircase waterfall

The “high road” to Devil’s Staircase waterfall in the rugged Coast Range southwest of Eugene is notoriously difficult.

The “low road” is no piece of cake either, according to a Eugene nature photographer who last month became one of the few people to have walked the length of Wasson Creek, on which the remote waterfall is located.

Eugene-area residents will have an opportunity this week to share photographer Tim Giraudier’s experience vicariously.

A slide presentation, “From Source to Confluence: Through-Hiking Wasson Creek in the Proposed Devil’s Staircase Wilderness,” will be screened Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in the Training Room at EWEB, 500 E. Fourth Ave., Eugene.

The free show is sponsored by Cascadia Wildlands and other groups in a consortium supporting creation of a 30,000-acre Devil’s Staircase Wilderness on land the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management own between the Umpqua River and Smith River, north of Scottsburg.

One of the largest remaining concentrations of virgin rainforest in the Coast Range, the Devil’s Staircase wild area includes terrain that “is the steepest, most confusing, and most challenging that you have ever attempted,” according to a warning posted on the wilderness coalition’s website. The group urges people to “not even attempt to find the waterfall without an experienced guide who has been there before.”

An estimated 100 people a year scramble up and down steep timbered ridges to the namesake water feature in the heart of the proposed 30,000-acre Devil’s Staircase Wilderness. With no trails in the area, the higher-elevation approach is a strenuous day-long bushwhack through country so steep and heavily timbered that GPS units often do not work.

Giraudier and Cameron Derbyshire, a volunteer guide with Cascadia Wildlands, took the lower, longer route in mid-September. They drove to within about a half-mile of Wasson Lake, which is little more than a shallow pond, then followed the outflow (Wasson Creek) on its long, twisting downhill plunge past Devil’s Staircase, Folly Falls and Lower Falls to Smith River.

The journey took three days and involved clawing through thick riparian-zone vegetation, crawling over and under downed logs and wading through beaver dam impoundments.

On the map, Giraudier said, Wasson Creek is 17 miles long, “but the reality of the through-hike, I would say, is closer to 25 to 30 miles, with all the constant zig-zagging.”

It took 8 1/2 hours, he said, “to cover about three river miles” on the first day.

The area “has earned the reputation as the Bermuda Triangle of the Oregon wilderness,” because so many people have gotten lost there, an Oregon Field Guide reporter said in a November 2009 feature on Devil’s Staircase Waterfall.

Following the creek to Devil’s Staircase presents a different kind of strenuous challenge than encountered by those who come in over the ridgeline.

“The ruggedness was more in the sense of unbelievable brush and pushing through thickets and crawling on your hands and knees,” Giraudier said. “And endlessly stepping over or crawling underneath fallen logs.”

The third day of the through-hike “was supposed to be the easiest because the stream widens and there should be gravel bars to walk on,” Giraudier said. “But, in fact, it was the hardest day because of constant beaver dams. ... As soon as one impoundment would end, you would get to the head of the next one. I think it was 15 active beaver dams we hiked through.”

In one of those, the hikers had what Giraudier called “an amazing experience.”

“Normally, I only hear beavers — that tail slap as they’re fleeing. But we actually had a beaver swim out as we were wading up to our knees and come swimming right around us, maybe six feet away, and circle around us twice. He was curious, which is maybe testimony to how few people actually go in there.”

Giraudier said he was “blown away” by “how full of life the stream was, whether it was crayfish or cutthroat trout, every riffle, every pool” had life in it.

“And there’s lots of large animals in there,” he said, with the stream bed serving as “kind of like a superhighway” for large critters. The hikers regularly flushed out animals ahead of them, he said, as evidenced by fresh scat and wet footprints of bear and cougar, and elk hoofprints in which muddy water still swirled.

One bull elk heard them approaching and bugled “maybe 100 feet away from us ... then, all of a sudden, he come running maybe 30 feet from us and 12 feet up on a terrace bank above the stream. He looked down on us briefly and then took off.”

In late summer, Wasson Creek features “little cascades at every twist and turn, super clear water and beautiful sandstone rock with the fall colors just starting to happen,” he said. And the low flows made it possible to find flat areas of bedrock on which to sleep at night.

But the streambed also provides testament to the power of the heavy winter run-off — “beautifully carved sandstone bedrock and deep scour holes where boulders had been drilling down,” Some of those measured three feet across and more than six feet deep, he said.

“For photography, all these different features are a delight.”

It’s a delight that, for all but the very physically fit and woods wise, is best seen in photos.

DEVIL’S DETAILS

Slide show: “From Source to Confluence: Through-hiking Wasson Creek in the Proposed Devil’s Staircase Wilderness,”6:30 p.m. Thursday, EWEB Training Room, 500 E. Fourth Ave., Eugene. Free.

Video: Oregon Field Guide’s November, 2009 PBS-TV segment on an overland hike to Devil’s Staircase waterfall can be viewed at: www.opb.org/programs/ofg/segments/view/1729.

Wilderness proposal: A photo gallery and more details are available vailabe at www.devilsstaircasewilderness.org