Today Emily and I headed out to Cape Horn on the Washington side of the Columbia River. This area is closed in the spring due to Falcons nesting along the cliffs so for a beautiful fall day it was the perfect hike nearby for us to check out. We got there early afternoon and it turned out to be a pretty hot day for October. Read on...
We parked in the large parking area and headed up hill towards the viewpoint over the Columbia. We both had just gotten our new iPhones the week before so this was the first trip for us to really test out their photo capabilities and we were both pleasantly surprised. 
Leo was happy to be out with us on the hike. We had invited Katie, Arley and Ryan but they had declined having had a pretty big day at the Octoberfest the day before. There was lots of activity on the Columbia below us from kayakers to SUPs, to a plane that had landed out on a sand spit with people tanning out there. At one point a huge barge passed below us, apparently following the deeper channel just below the cliffs we were up on. 
We followed the trail down and then across Highway 14 to the lower section atop the cliffs on the edge of the Columbia. This is where the falcons nest and we could hear some but couldn’t see them. We did hear a train rumbling nearby though and ran down the trail to see the mile long freight train appear out of a tunnel in the mountain directly below us. It was definitely pretty interesting to hear and feel the train underneath us in the hillside. 
We followed the trail down below the huge basalt cliffs we were just on top of and across some big scree fields to a very cool waterfall that we all ran through to cool off. We tried out the slow-mo feature of our phones with the waterfall and when I found a banana slug I tried out the timelapse to speed the critter up a bit. 
When we reached the end of the trail we had to follow a road back to the main highway and parking lot for about a mile. We had taken our time and the whole 7 mile hike took us about 4 hours to walk, but we had definitely stopped a lot to toy with our new gadgets and check out the views with Leo. We saw lots of flowers and it was nice to get out of the city for the hot afternoon.
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