The Family Camping Blog

I would venture a guess that relatively few Oregonians know about Alsea Falls, which is tucked away in the Central Coast Range between the city of Corvallis and the town of Monroe, so how did this outsider from California find it? Luckily I was raised in the nearby town of Alsea (population 500), which gets its name from the Alsea Tribe that inhabited the area.

 

Alsea Falls is the perfect place for children to explore and have fun. After a vertical drop of thirty feet, the falls run over a series of rock shelves for several hundred feet before emptying into a pool that is the perfect size for wading or swimming. Numerous rocks and snags below the pool make for easy crossing of the river.

 

The campground is an easy half-mile hike from the falls. It has just sixteen sites and they are all large and surrounded by Douglas fir, alder and maple trees. I have become quite adept at aiming the satellite dish between trees, but there was absolutely no sense in even attempting it here! There was also no cellular service (T-Mobile or Verizon) available in the area, which somehow seemed fitting. None of the sites are reservable, but we had half-a-dozen to choose from, on a Friday afternoon.

Campgrounds like this are often difficult to find, since they do not accept reservations and thus do not appear on the popular reservation sites, like Reserve America or Recreation.gov. I am currently using state atlases from Benchmark Maps, which shows many of the state and federal campgrounds, and online searches to locate county and city parks.