Clackamas River Trail to Pup Creek Falls

We’ve only just started exploring the wilderness near the Clackamas River… endless opportunities to the south of Mt Hood. We’ve been looking for hikes we can do after church on Sunday which means they can’t really go beyond the 8 mile mark and the trailhead needs to be within an hour of our home in southeast Portland. Alltrails shows this trail as 7.3 miles roundtrip though my GPS watch ended up showing me another mile or so. While we were expecting this to take 5 hours, we knocked it off in just under 4 without pushing it too hard.

The views are stunning and the trail delightful. We read about plenty of ticks along this path, but didn’t spot any. What we did enjoy were numerous smaller waterfalls during the buildup to the one big one at Pup Falls. Another unexpected joy was watching kayakers taking the whitewater head on in the Clackamas.