Easy Hike to Benham Falls south of Bend, Oregon

We've done this hike before, but apparently never blogged about it, so here goes. I haven't been blogging much which drives me crazy. I think my last post was in September. I really need to get back to this on a more routine basis. I like writing and I like sharing my experiences with people. I hope someone might find a hike that they might night have done otherwise. It's also nice to have a log that I can go back to and see how hard a hike really was for me. There are some that I remember were absolute hell or some that weren't so bad, but the ones that aren't quite so memorable, it's nice to have this to fall back on.

This hike is easy to find. Just head south of Bend, Oregon and look for the sign directing you to the Lava Butte visitor center thing. It's south of the High Desert Museum and it's on the opposite side of the road. If you're heading south, it's on your right. Once you turn right, follow the Benham Falls signs. At the end, there is a parking lot. Once you're at the parking lot, head to the water and follow the trail to the right. You'll follow it along and go over a bridge. It's narrow until you get to the bridge. The bridge is wide and then the path gets wide as well. It's pretty flat, and the ground is pretty level without many rocks. The hike it about a half a mile according to the sign at the trailhead.

Don't do what we did the first time we went! When you're getting pretty close to the falls, you can hear them and there is a little spot where you can walk down closer to the river so you might think you're at the falls because it has this little fence thing that looks like, "Hey come over here and see this!" It's not "the falls" so just keep going. There is a Pokemon gym down there though if you're into Pokemon. The place was loaded with Pokemon. It also had two gyms. Once of the gyms was up by the bridge and that's where the two Pokestops were also. Anyway......keep walking....

You'll see a vault toilet building and a parking lot. If you want to just come see the falls and not have to walk to get to them, you could figure out how to park here. We don't know how to park here though and we like the walk. You can walk up the steps that you see as you head to the parking lot and then walk down the switchbacks to the overlook or you can keep walking to the parking lot and take the switchbacks there. It's a little downhill to the overlook, but it's really not bad. It's a narrower trail down there also. This waterfall is more of a set of rapids than it is a waterfall. I think it's a 40 foot drop, but it's 40 feet spread out so it's not like you see water coming over a cliff like a traditional waterfall. It's still pretty. People have died going through the rapids in kayaks. There's a log jam by the bridge, so it would be hard to go through them by accident. You'd have to put the kayak in in a place you're not supposed to be anyway.

After you spend five minutes looking at the falls, just turn around and head back. We saw either two deer or the same deer twice. There were a lot of birds and there was a cute little squirrel in a tree. There were also a ton of Pokemon. I'm back to playing Pokemon to try to get me to walk more. We did the little offshoot to get down to the Pokemon gym. I've managed to stay there for 5 hours and 47 minutes so far. I haven't gotten kicked out of the log jam gym yet either. I guess I'm not surprised because I just don't imagine many people go there to play Pokemon. However, the place is loaded with the critters. I went in with 130 red balls and left with like 10! Some of that is because I had bad aim while walking, but let's just not talk about that part.

So I've rattled on for longer than it probably took to do the hike. Part of that is because I'm waiting for my pictures to upload to Google Photo so I can load them. It's been a few months though since I backed them up soooooooo it's taking it's sweet time. If you're in the area, this is worth seeing. You can make this a much longer hike as well. You could park in the same lot and walk to Dillon Falls which is another rapids and not a waterfall. I think it's 7 miles from the parking lot to Dillon Falls. We've been to Dillon, but we did it from the other side and started at the Meadow Park or whatever it's called.

I took a video, but I can't get it into the blog right now. We didn't get a pic of the deer because they took off before I was able to get the camera out.