The Devil’s Staircase remains as elusive today as it was decades ago. Photo © Andy Stahl
Deep in the Coast Range, nestled between the Smith and Umpqua Rivers, is one of Oregon’s most remote locations—the Devil’s Staircase in Wassen Creek. In the 1970s, the very existence of the Devil’s Staircase was hotly debated among student environmental activists at Oregon State University’s Environmental Center. Some thought the staircase of waterfalls with plunge pools as large as bathtubs carved into the sandstone bedrock was only a wilderness myth. Others were convinced the waterfalls existed, but didn’t know where along the miles of sinuous and inaccessible creek they would be found.
The years-long search for the Devil’s Staircase took Environmental Center students and the volunteer activists of the now-defunct Siuslaw Task Force on legendary bushwhacks down cliffs and into impenetrable vine maple thickets as they sought first to find Wassen Creek—in itself a challenge—and then to follow it downstream, hoping the falls were just around the next bend. They remained elusive. Over the years, many searchers spent rainy nights at the bottom of Wassen Creek’s steep and rugged ravines, fighting to find their way though areas that remain unmappable.
They never did find the Devil’s Staircase. But I did. More than twenty-five years ago, I joined the founder of the Wassen Creek Wilderness Committee (who was later to become my wife) on a cross-country trek to resolve, we hoped, the Devil’s Staircase mystery. We started on the only “trail” into Wassen Creek’s backcountry—nothing more than a deer track that jumped off a logging road on the north side of the creek. Our plan was to find the creek and then, by following the creek bed downstream, traverse its entire length to the Smith River. We would then have to cross the Smith River to reach the old pickup truck we had stashed on the other side; we weren’t sure how we would accomplish that task.
We hiked in the creek bed, as it was the only feasible route. Using sticks for balance and shod in tennis shoes, our progress was slow—we had to climb under, over and around the huge trees that had fallen across the creek. We saw bull elk, a family of river otters as surprised to see us as we were to stumble across them, and shy black bears that turned tail and scampered away when we neared. One thing we didn’t see: any sign that anyone had ever been there before. Not a candy wrapper, a beer bottle, a blaze on a tree, a fire ring or a footstep in the mud. By the second day we realized that if anything should go wrong—a sprained ankle or other injury—there was no easy way out.
On day three, we found it; the Devil’s Staircase was everything we had hoped. Wassen Creek flows over sandstone steps as it tumbles down about fifty feet. Into each step the creek had drilled round plunge pools, using hard, igneous pebbles to scrape away the softer sandstone. The pools ranged in size from those large enough for several people to bathe in to small thimbles that had just begun to erode.
Even those who never had the thrill of seeing it recognized that the legendary site deserved to be protected forever as a wilderness area. In 1984, the U.S. House of Representatives considered an Oregon Wilderness bill that included Wassen Creek. But Representative Jim Weaver was forced by Mark Hatfield, Oregon’s senior senator, to choose between Wassen Creek and an area in southern Oregon that was equally deserving of protection. Weaver chose the latter, not because he didn’t recognize the value of both, but because the other land was more imminently threatened by logging.
Wassen Creek is home to the coast range’s highest density of spotted owls and provides habitat for salmon and steelhead, which migrate as far as the waterfall’s impenetrable barrier. The area was protected from logging and road building by the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994, and today it remains the finest stand of old-growth, ancient forest in Oregon’s Coast Range.
But it may not stay that way. Wassen Creek is public land, half managed by the U.S. Forest Service and half by the Bureau of Land Management. As a part of its Western Oregon Plan Revision, the Bureau of Land Management has proposed to open up its half of the Wassen Creek area to logging. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed to remove critical habitat protection for the northern spotted owl from BLM’s purview, giving carte blanche to BLM’s logging plans.
In December, I tried again to find the Devil’s Staircase. On an unusually temperate Saturday, I joined my co-worker James Johnston and a couple of biologists who had studied spotted owls in Wassen Creek for years and assured us they could find the Staircase. A four-hour, cross-country traverse of knife-edge ridges—culminating with a sword fern rappel down the last precipitous incline—found us at Wassen Creek, faced with a coin-flip choice: was the waterfall upstream or down? After consulting our GPS receiver and detailed topographic map, we chose up. Half a slippery mile of creek hiking later, we realized Devil’s Staircase had eluded us—it was somewhere downstream, out of reach once again. We finished the hike after nightfall, thankful for the flashlights James had the foresight to pack.
Finding the Devil’s Staircase continues to be a challenge; ensuring that it remains wild forever may be a bigger one.