Leon Turnbull Photography

On Good Friday our church was having an all night prayer vigil. They wanted people to sign up throughout the night to come to the church for 30 minutes to pray. I signed up for 4AM. I know what you are thinking. I am nuts! But I had a plan, and it was that afterwards, I would drive on up to Lake Tahoe to catch the sunrise at Eagle Falls. It was a great plan! But as usual, God had a different plan in mind for me. His plan started out with heavy overcast clouds in the forecast over Tahoe and snow/rain showers. I could see during the day on Friday that my great sunrise plan was not going to work out too well, so I nixed that idea, and decided that instead I would just go on a hike after the prayer vigil up on Ice House Rd. And since it was overcast, I would not need to worry about hurrying up there to get there before sunrise. And in doing so, I would be able to spend more time in prayer at church. Exactly what God wanted! Funny that.

Anyway, Jay Bird Canyon Falls was my first destination of the day, and I ended up arriving not too long after sunrise. It had crazy flow! Although it is a very tall waterfall (173 ft. high), the creek is small, and usually the waterfall is just a nice, pretty, dainty, thin flowing waterfall. Today it was a 173 ft. high monster! The entire amphitheatre where it drops into was full of mist from the falls. There was not a dry spot to be had to take a photo. I got completely drenched as I approached closer to the waterfall, and the mist was freezing cold from snow melt as well. I could not find any place to take a photo (even up on the ridge opposite the falls was full of mist). Well, it was certainly an awesome experience, and I take it as a very good sign for things to come this spring. If this small waterfall (in terms of creek size) had such a powerful flow, what are other waterfalls (such as Yosemite) going to be like this spring? They will certainly be amazingly awesome for sure. I suppose you are wondering where I did take this photo. Perhaps especially if you have been here before and do not know where this spot is. Obviously it was taken from further back. Not from the road. It is kind of a secret, so I’ll leave it to you to figure out.

More info on Jay Bird Canyon Falls:
http://www.waterfallswest.com/waterfall.php?id=218

This is Lower Pennyweight Falls in Colfax, 22 ft. high. I went here after work last week. With the flow in the creek so much reduced, it was pretty easy to rock hop across the creek and up to the falls. It certainly would be nicer with a bit more flow. However, it was still very nice, and I enjoyed my time and solitude at these falls on this particular evening.

Here is another view of Dutch Creek Falls. For my sunset shot, I was standing up on the ledge in the middle, right beside the falls. It does not look like much of a ledge from this angle. It just looks steep. And I suppose it is. 🙂 For this shot, I was standing up on a big rock. It was steep also.

More:
http://waterfallswest.com/waterfall.php?id=459

Well, since I struck out on my waterfall hike last weekend, and since this next weekend I will not be able to go out hiking at all (as my wife has a karate seminar), I was in a bit of a quandary. The waterfalls were rushing. How could I get out to see them? The solution I came up with … go out after work during the week. That meant I had to go someplace close by. Dutch Creek Falls was the decision, and it turned out to be a good one.

I got hold of my friend Rob at the last minute, and he was up for it. Cool. So at 5PM, we met up at Coloma ready to head out in the very hot weather on our hike.

Dutch Creek Falls is such an amazing place. Four fantastic waterfalls in one place, two of them being about 100 ft. high and falling side by side into a beautiful and rugged canyon, with steep dropoffs all around. I definitely would have to say that these are the best waterfalls in the greater Sacramento area. They do not flow in the summer, but in the winter it is a stunning location. And they are sure flowing right now. After an incredible March, we are now at 170 percent of normal snowpack. We are going to be in for one heckuva spring waterfall season.

Anyway, in short order Rob and I battled our way through the ticks up to the waterfall. I led the way, of course, swatting away hundreds of them with my hiking pole from the grasses hanging over the trail. Rob still owes me a beer for doing that. Once at the falls, we decided to go up to the top, and try to cross the creek above Johntown Creek Falls. Johntown Creek Falls was raging. How would we cross? Well, as it turned out it was not as difficult as I imagined it would be. The water was deep, up to my thighs, but it was calm enough to cross without difficulty. Rob had a little more trouble as he had to cross in his bare feet, and as he puts it, he is a “tender foot”. Fortunately, I brought my water shoes in anticipation of such a crossing. We worked our way down to Dutch Creek and Johntown Creek Falls on the other side, Rob going the mountain goat way (down the  cliff), and I going the easier way (steep but less treacherous). Johntown was very misty so we just took a quick shot there, then went over to Dutch Creek and spent most of our time there, and eventually waiting around for sunset. There were some nice wispy clouds over the valley, and the sunset was absolutely gorgeous. It was amazingly beautiful, standing beside a fabulous waterfall, looking across the canyon at a gorgeous sunset.

After this, of course we had to hike back down. In the dark. We tried to hurry, crossing back above Johntown Falls. I did not want to climb down the cliff on the other side in the dark, but by the time we got there, it was already fairly dark. It was not really too bad though, as we both had headlamps. We walked pretty fast back to the car, and I think because of this I managed to wrench my  back again. I was in severe pain the next day. I certainly do not recall doing anything in particular, it must just have been that I was hurrying too much and straining it on the hike back. We also almost got waylaid by a skunk on the way back, which was rather interesting. I was in the lead, and as I looked ahead I noticed a small black animal running up the trail ahead of us. I could not see any white on it. Was it a skunk? A racoon? maybe a house cat? (there were houses in the area). What was it? Rob decided to follow it into the bushes for some odd reason. Then all of a sudden he is yelling at me. “Leon run away! Run away! It is a skunk. And it has its tail up!”. Well, fortunately we managed to avoid getting sprayed. And we also managed to avoid getting tick bites as well. Now where is my beer, Mr. Macklin?

More info on Dutch Creek Falls:
http://waterfallswest.com/waterfall.php?id=459

Well we were supposed to get snow Friday night in the Sacramento area. I was expecting (not really) to wake up to a winter wonderland Saturday morning in Folsom. It would have been nice. But I did anticipate that Auburn would have a nice dumping Friday night. It did snow there on Friday morning I guess, but they were supposed to get more Friday night and that did not happen. When I arrived in Auburn first thing Saturday morning, all the snow was gone. I was hoping to get some snowy shots down at the Confluence, of the No Hands Bridge along the river, and I was also planning to go to the Black Hole of Calcutta Falls, hoping for some snow there as well. With no snow, the No Hands Bridge was out of the question. I considered going to the waterfall, but I already have a good shot of that one, so I nixed that idea. Time to implement Plan B.

Plan B turned out to be an ideal choice. And a fantastic adventurous one as well. My idea was to try to get to a waterfall on Clipper Creek, about 1.5 miles upriver from the Confluence. I did not really think I would be able to make it. I was certain there was no trail, that it would be too brushy, too tick infested, too poison oak infested, and worst of all, much too cliffy to get up that far. But hey, I am always up for an adventure and a mad scramble through brush and poison oak. There certainly was a lot of poison oak. I knew that, and I anticipated that, but that was the least of my worries, so I thought. When I tried this route last year, I got turned back by ticks. In the spring, this whole area is infested with the buggers. I have said it many times, I can handle the poison oak, but I cannot handle the ticks. But I figured this was a good time to go, with the recent cold weather, perhaps they would not be lurking about. And I was right again about this. I only had to pluck a single one of the little beasts off me today.

As for the rest of it, I was pretty much completely wrong. And that made me ecstatic. What I mean is that there was indeed a trail to follow. And it went from the Confluence all the way up to Clipper Creek and beyond (likely, all the way to Lake Clementine). It was an old trail, and certainly overgrown, but hey, it was a trail. No bushwhacking through thick brush and along steep cliffs. That was my next worry, as I knew there were steep cliffs on this side of the river. But the trail seemed to bypass these cliffy sections quite perfectly. There were no dangerous sections along the trail at all. It was certainly not an easy hike, that is for sure. But it was definitely an adventurous one, and one that I will do again for certain.

As for the waterfall, well it was a dandy. It was smaller than I expected. The topo maps seem to indicate a waterfall in the neighborhood of 60 ft. or so, and I measured this one to be 27 ft. high. I was a bit surprised at that, as it seemed quite a bit bigger than that, but hey, 27 ft. is not shabby, and it definitely was worth the effort to get to this one. As Arnold says, I’ll be back.

http://www.waterfallswest.com/waterfall.php?id=628