Leon Turnbull Photography

Two years ago I went into West Cherry Creek Canyon in Emigrant Wilderness with my son. We saw two spectacular waterfalls and had an amazing experience. I thought the canyon was one of the most stunning places I have ever seen, it was so beautiful: the waterfalls, the creek, the mountains, I was in complete awe (Jadon did not have the same emotional experience that I did). Last year, I went back to West Cherry Creek to a different location (without Jadon), and I saw three more amazing waterfalls, and again, I thought the canyon was absolutely breathtaking. This year, I wanted to return once more to West Cherry Creek to yet a different spot to see yet different waterfalls. Would I have the same emotional experience and go three for three in this amazing canyon? (spoiler alert: yes, I would)

It is a long drive to the trailhead. It was Memorial Day weekend. Traffic was surprisingly very light. Was this due to COVID-19? I’m not sure, but from what I’ve been reading, everyone is packing up all the open parks and trails now, and I expected everyone to be out and about somewhere on the long weekend. The last few miles to the trailhead are extremely rough, but I made it as far as possible and was stopped a mile from the official trailhead due to snow on the road. There was one other car here, perhaps some people backpacking down in the canyon?

It is a four mile hike to the waterfall (five, because I had to walk an extra mile), so it is easy enough to do as a day hike. But it is not an easy hike. There is an unofficial and unmarked trail to the creek. Many people use this trail to backpack to Hyatt Lake in the summer. Nonetheless, it is faint in many spots, I completely lost the trail more than once, and ended up having to bushwhack through the forest.

Finally, I emerged from the forest to get my first view of the West Cherry Canyon. Absolutely stunning! (no surprise to me). West Cherry Creek was flowing very strong off in the distance. The trail traverses down to the creek where backpackers cross it to go to Hyatt Lake, but it was not crossable today. The inflow to Cherry Lake was at 1000 cfs (West Cherry is about half that). There is no more trail from here, so I had to go cross country to the waterfall. This is a magnificent stretch of hiking as you walk along the granite rock beside the fast flowing creek. There were a couple difficult spots (brush, swamp, cliff, etc.), but mostly it was glorious. The last section involves climbing up a cliff (not hard), where as you come over the top, you are at the top of the waterfall with amazing views in all directions.

The waterfall is spectacular at high flow. What shall I name it? It is somewhat close to Middle West Cherry Falls, so I think I must name it Lower Middle West Cherry Falls. (I know, it is a crappy name). It probably deserves a better one. It is very wide and shoots off in two separate cascades, each about 40 ft. high. It was too wide to photograph with my camera lens, but I did the best I could. The lighting was good as I arrived at the bottom of the waterfall, and there are tons of angles and photographic opportunities. I took many many photos, much more than I normally do. I was in heaven.

There is a second falls here, and I wanted to go check it out as well. It was much harder to reach and involved climbing up and down a cliff. No easy feat, it was very difficult, and it took a long time. When I got down to the bottom, the light was crappy and I did not take any photos of the waterfall, but it is another spectacular cascade, and I think I will have to return here next year and perhaps camp here. Indeed, there was someone camping here at this second falls. I was a bit shocked to see anyone down here. It is way off the beaten path, and as I said, very difficult to get to. I was even more shocked when I saw him come out of his tent. He was stark naked. The temperature was chilly, only about 50 degrees or so. He was just hanging out (literally) beside his tent. He did not see me sitting by the waterfall. I think he did see me eventually and went back into his tent (thankfully!). No doubt he was as shocked to see me there, as I was to see him with all his bits hanging out. By the way, I think he was backpacking alone – I only saw one pair of hiking boots by the tent when I passed by – some people are a bit odd, I guess.

After he went back into his tent and after I had eaten some food, I packed up my stuff, got a load of fresh water from the river, and headed back up the mountain. I went back up a different route. It was not any easier. In fact, I think it was harder. Technically, it was a shorter route back to the main trail, but it took longer due to the difficulty. When I return next year, I’m not sure how I will come. Hopefully, there will not be any naked people camping at the waterfall. That’s about all I can say about that. I got back to the car and drove home. It was a very hard hike, and an absolutely awesome journey (again) into the West Cherry Creek Canyon of the Emigrant Wilderness.

I checked the weather forecast all week, every day, at least twice a day. Multiple different weather apps. Every single time on every single app it said it would be cloudy all day on Saturday. Right up until I went to bed on Friday night. This was the perfect forecast. I had a big hike planned on Saturday, and I did not want to get up at some stupid ridiculous hour to hike in order to make it to the planned destination on time and take photos in good lighting conditions. So I slept in a bit on Saturday. When I woke up I checked the forecast. What do you think it said? PARTLY CLOUDY. What the &*$#&*($%# ?? Are you kidding me ???

I almost went back to bed. However, I decided to drive up the hill anyway, in hopes that the conditions would be ok once I got up there. Nope. I arrived at the trailhead and it was sunny. It would be pointless to do this very difficult hike now. There was no possible way I could make it to the waterfalls in good light.  I drove all the way up here, though, and I did not want to just turn around and go back home, so I decided to do a different, easy hike, that I have done many times before: North Fork Falls. I have plenty of photos of it, but I have not made a video of it yet, so it seemed like a good plan.

Normally when I go to North Fork Falls, it is winter. It is far too treacherous in the winter to get all the way down to the river. In the spring, however, it is a different story. The last little bit is still quite dangerous, however, so I used my rope for safety. I made it down to the river without any incident. It is a slightly better point of view from river level. North Fork Falls is a very beautiful 27 ft. high waterfall. No one else was around at the falls or on the trail (though I did see people camping in the closed campground – somehow, I was not surprised). It was a lovely, quick and easy hike in the Tahoe National Forest.

It was only two weeks ago everyone was exclaiming STAY HOME and shaming anyone who wanted to go out hiking (even though it was allowed). Now it is the complete opposite: EVERYONE is going out hiking, even people who do not normally hike. I don’t blame them for wanting to go out hiking, but seriously people, absolutely nothing has changed in two weeks to warrant this drastic turnabout. The only thing that has changed is the weather. Problem is, all the parks are still closed. Thus the trails that are open are overly crowded, much more so than usual for this time of year (Bassi Falls, Horsetail Falls, Feather Falls, to name a few), and people are trashing all these places horribly, leaving their litter behind. Whatever happened to Leave No Trace, people? Traverse Creek Falls is now closed off because of this: over popularity of this location as a direct result of people posting on a certain Facebook group (I’m not naming it). Now no one can go there anymore because of these idiots. Most true hikers are respectful (and probably everyone reading this), but there are just far too many who have no respect for nature. I’ve said it before: these people have no right to be out hiking whatsoever.

When I go hiking I want to go to places where most people do not go. I have been to all these other popular places many times. Especially right now, I want to go hiking in places where there won’t be anyone and I will have the trail all to myself. Enter Loch Leven Lakes. This is a trail that is not popular, there definitely won’t be anyone there. So I thought. However, when I arrived at the trailhead at 7:30AM, there were already a bunch of cars in the parking lot, and a big group was just heading out. What the heck? There should not be anyone here! Especially this early! This is NOT NORMAL.

My plan was for a big two night trip down to the North Fork American River. It did not turn out that way.  There was still quite a bit of snow up at the lakes, and worse: along the trail going up to the lakes. I knew there would be snow of course. There was about 3-4 feet of snow on the trail, and 2-3 feet up at the lakes. It was perhaps a little more than I expected, but it is close to what I thought it would be. I was prepared for it, and I had my microspikes as well. Not so for the multitudes of other people on the trail. Everyone I talked to on the trail was shocked that there was snow, even though you can clearly see from the trailhead that there is a lot of snow up on top. What is that white stuff up there, darling? Duh, I don’t know, honey.  Pretty much everyone turned back well before the top. I even saw a couple backpackers who were camped right along the trail because they could not make it up through the snow. I only saw two other people up at the lakes. It was very tough going. It took a full 3 hours to hike 3.5 miles up to the top and far end of the lakes (where I camped). The snow was soft and there was a great danger of postholing and seriously injuring yourself. Every step needs to be certain and secure. I sank in a few times, but mostly it was just grueling and slow.

My hope was to continue on the Big Granite trail down to the river. Finding the trail in the snow was completely impossible. Even as I descended and left the snow behind, I still could not find any semblance of trail. It was overgrown, brushy, and non-existent. I could not have been prepared for this, and was not expecting it to be this bad. It was getting late now and I had to give up. A full blown bushwhack of 6 miles in length was not going to work. I returned to the lakes and setup camp there. It was a nice little campsite at the end of the lake. The bad news is that there were flies. Little flies that bite (and it really hurt too). Somehow about 50 flies got in my tent even though the zipper was all closed. I found only one small hole in my tent. Did all these flies get in through that little hole? That seems a bit ridiculous but how else did they get in? That was the bad news. The good news is that there were a couple small waterfalls here, which I did not know about before. Not really very exciting but certainly much better than nothing. This is the biggest of the cascades, about 30 ft. high. It was a small consolation for my trip cut too short in the Tahoe National Forest.

This stream is not even marked on any of my maps at all. When I was here in the winter, this waterfall did not exist. But in the spring, here I find this drop dead gorgeous waterfall. I was delighted.

I had a very rude awakening by the jeepers. They were driving around the reservoir in the middle of the night (very loudly), and they decided they would drive through my camping area right beside my tent! There is no road here! They knew I was there also, because it was the same group of which I picked up their trash earlier. I found this extremely annoying and disrespectful.

Needless to say, I got very little sleep. Nonetheless, I wanted to get up very early, at 5AM to be precise. Are you crazy, madman? Well, it is because I wanted to attempt to find a new waterfall and get there before the sun got on it. I packed up camp, had a quick breakfast, and headed out at 6AM.

I really did not think I was going to make it. My planned route I determined that looked best on Google Earth took me to the edge of a cliff with no way down. I did not see this cliff on Google Earth! After a couple other tries and a lot of scrambling around through brush, I finally found a way around the cliff. I was very tired from all the scrambling around, and it was getting late. I still thought I was going to get cliffed out again, but I continued down the creekside and finally came out at the bottom. I was not cliffed out! I got all the way down to the reservoir and to the bottom of this gorgeous 70 ft. cascade. The light was still good. I was absolutely ecstatic! It was such a beautiful morning, and such a beautiful location and waterfall. This was my favorite waterfall of all the falls I saw this weekend. I love discovering brand new waterfalls!

It was easier climbing back up to the trail because I did not have scramble around the brush the same way that I came down. I took a big break to rest. From here it was a 3 mile hike back to my car. It was hot and slow going but I made it back to my car by 10:30AM. Except for the disrespectful jeepers, it was an amazing springtime adventure into the Hell Hole.