Oneota Gorge....

Growing up as a child my family always went hiking around Oregon...on the beach, in the gorge ect.... So I was very excited this year when my kids had finally grown to a size suitable for hiking! I planned to ease them into it easy...my mom had heard of hike called Oneota gorge that was supposed to be about a mile and a half long and.... bonus... you get to walk in a "very cute little creek most of the way"Yeah!!! The perfect start to hiking for the kids and I! So we picked a hot day and met in the gorge with Jake and Mackenzie's cousins and set off on our hike. The first picture above was the start of our day.....beautiful... we were so excited to get started on our "Creek Hike at Oneota gorge".....

So we started our walk and it was straight up a hill with no creek in sight..we thought "Hmmmm.....it must be at the top of this hill" so we kept walking and walking... when we finally got to the top of the hill we didn't find a creek to walk in.... but we DID find a super cool cave and AWESOME water fall! This made up for the lack of creek walking up to this point..... so we decided that the creek walk must be just a little bit further up the trail......

Again up another VERY steep hill....this kids were doing OK....but not loving it..they were hungry, tired, hot and wondering where in the heck was the "cute little creek"....Mom and I just kept saying "I'm sure it just up ahead".....we actually had no idea!

Well...we finally found a nice place for the kids to play in the water and eat some lunch...it was only 3.5 miles up a steep mountain!!!!!! Needless to say we were on the WRONG trail! Poor kids had a really tough start to there hiking adventures.... but honestly they did sooo good! (about 7 miles total) The trip down the mountain was much easier than the trip up and hey...on our way down we saw the trail head to Oneota Gorge......maybe next time :)

PS - Jacob had a 3 hour football practice AFTER that hike.....he was dying....not the smartest move on my part ;)