Snoquera Falls and the Palisades Winter Hike

We decided to combine two hikes today, the Snoquera Falls Loop hike (mostly highlighted in yellow) with the Palisades Trail (we went as far as the orange highlighted area today) for 13.2 miles and 2,270 ft of overall elevation gain. These hikes are located off of Hwy 410 before the turnoff to Crystal Mtn.

View of Snoquera Falls as seen on the drive up to the trailhead. The falls are coming down off the Palidades.

The beginning of the Snoquera Falls loop hike is a nice flat forested walk for 0.5 miles, before heading uphill.

The trail climbs up 770 ft to Snoquera Falls (449 ft).

Wide angle shot of Snoquera Falls

There was a fair amount of water on the trail below the falls, but we felt comfortable crossing here to continue on the loop trail.

View of Snoquera Falls from the other side of the loop trail.

Along the upper part of this loop trail we could see across the valley to Suntop.

Beautiful vistas of moss, trees and rocky cliffs as we hiked down along the Snoquera Falls Loop trail.

We dropped down most of the 700 ft of elevation, and hiked about 0.4 miles on a connector trail over the the west end of the Palisades Trail. This trail begins to climb almost immediately.

The creek was overflowing the trail.

In about a mile, we reached the short boot path to Lower Dalles Falls (280 ft).

There were some trees down on the trail and some areas had mud slides and rock slides. It was all passable.

After climbing about 0.5 miles further up the trail, we reached Upper Dalles Falls.

Near the top of the switchbacks are these nice wooden steps!

The trail then climbs at a much more gradual pace, continuing through the forest and over streams.

At the first viewpoint atop the palisades, we had a view of Suntop across the valley and

we could also see Skookum Falls (zoom)

While continuing on to the second viewpoint, our light misting turned into snowfall.

















When we reached the second viewpoint, we were in the clouds.

We hiked a short ways further to get out of the wind and enjoy our lunch. Quite a bit of snow had fallen by the time we ate our lunch, so we decided to return before enough snow fell to obliterate the trail.

After hiking back down the Palisades trail, we rejoined the mostly flat section on the Snoquera Falls Loop trail to the trailhead.
















We did encounter another area where the creek overflowed the trail.