Leon Turnbull Photography

I got out hiking three times over the long Thanksgiving weekend. I struck out wildly on Thursday and Friday in my search for new waterfalls. By Sunday, I was in desperate need of getting to at least some new waterfall. But it had to be an easy one.

I will talk more later about my Thursday and Friday strike outs. I have at least one photo to share from those outings. But for now I wanted to share this photo from Sunday morning first. Because by golly this is a pretty little waterfall, though it is a small one.

The reason for the easy hike on Sunday is because I was hiking with my dog all weekend. She is very old. She is a gamer and goes where-ever, but I think I pushed her a little too hard on Thursday and Friday, unintentionally of course, but that is what happens to me when I go waterfall hunting. Things are never as easy as I plan or expect. So for Sunday, I needed an easy hike, and even as such, this turned out to be a bit harder than I expected. I was also hoping my son would join me on this hike, but he opted out, stating lack of appropriate hiking gear available to him up at Nana and Papa’s house.

It is less than a mile hike over to Waters Gulch in Shasta Trinity National Forest, a small stream dumping into Lake Shasta. I had heard there was a waterfall on this creek, and I was hoping it was flowing well, since the other creeks in the area seemed to be going at a good clip, thanks to recent rain in the past week. Actually I was just hoping I could get to it and photograph it.

I found the waterfall all right, and it was easy enough to get down to the bottom of it, and easy for Kaya as well. It was smaller than I anticipated, though its actual height will depend on how it is measured. I have not decided if I should count the upper tier as part of the waterfall’s height or not (oh, the complications). Anyway, the bottom tier is the prettiest, and is shown here. The waterfall flow was much lower than I hoped. I think at high flow, this would be a really nice one overall, but not so much at lower flows. A local cougar apparently likes dining here also. I found an old bone and what was left over of some small animal beside the waterfall. Hmmm. Thankfully, the cougar was not waiting around to catch unsuspecting waterfall hunters.

After shooting the lower falls, I wanted to photograph the upper tier as well, and that meant climbing up to the top of this lower waterfall. Easy enough for me, but not so easy for Kaya. In her youth, she could bound up the rocks easily. But in her old age, she cannot. I lifted her up two big rock steps to get her to the top. However, once we got to the top, it suddenly occurred to me that I would not be able to get her back down the waterfall. There is no way she would let me carry her down. Phooey. I looked around in a moment of panic for an alternate exit. I found one. There was a path up the steep bank back up to the main trail. Through poison oak. I think I would have much preferred going back the same way, but for Kaya’s sake we went up through the oak instead. We made it safely and hopefully without the itch. It was a nice easy morning at Lake Shasta.

First off, I must apologize to friend and fellow photographer Eric Leslie, who just posted his own photograph of this small waterfall on Brandy Creek, near Redding. I don’t mean to intrude on his fanfare, and I also really think his photo is much better than mine. You can see his photo here. I never bothered to process my photo from this location because at the time, I did not like it. However, after seeing his shot, I looked back in my archives and seeing as I had nothing else to post anyway, I decided to give it a go.

This was taken on the weekend after Thanksgiving of last year (2011). I came here with another photographer, Brian Rueb, and we were looking for a much larger waterfall on Brandy Creek. I am sure there are bigger waterfalls on this creek, but as of yet, I have not found any. We just came across this very small waterfall. It is a steep descent down to the creek at this spot, requiring a lot of scrambling around, and if I recall, poison oak as well. Brian did not even bother taking out his camera for this small waterfall, and I just took a quick shot myself, balancing myself on a rock in the middle of the creek. Afterwards, we went over to Crystal Creek Falls on the other side of Whiskeytown Lake. I think one of the main reasons I never bothered processing it was because I was disappointed in its size, hoping to find a much bigger waterfall than this. Now, a year later, I kinda like it. Go figure.

This past weekend our family went up north to visit the in-laws to celebrate a couple birthdays in the family. It was definitely nice to get away from home for a bit. On Saturday, I went out hiking with my son, Jadon, to this waterfall in Lassen National Forest, called Lower Deer Creek Falls. I have been here before, and although I tried, I could not really get any different kind of photo from here. The creek was flowing a bit too strong to get across it, but I did get into the middle of the stream as far as I could to take this photo. As usual, it was extremely c-c-c-c-c-old. However, after standing in the stream for awhile, my feet got numb enough such that I did not even notice the cold. haha.

Anyway, though I have been here before, I chose this spot again for a couple reasons. One, I wanted an easy enough hike that I could take Jadon on. Second, it was on the way to Chico where we were having lunch with the family afterwards, so it made perfect sense to go here. Third, I was hoping to see the California gray wolf.

California has one wolf as of right now (despite some peoples’ thoughts that there are plenty more), and currently it has been hanging out in western Plumas and eastern Tehama counties for the past couple months or so. This kind of thing interests me a lot, and I have been following its trackings on the Dept of Fish and Game website. They do not tell you exactly where it is, just a vague general area (which of course makes a lot of sense – you would not want any bad people out trying to find it to harm it, for example). I would have loved to have seen the wolf on an early morning hike, but of course the general area of eastern Tehama county is a huge area, and the odds of seeing it on this morning would be astronomical. You would have much better luck finding a needle in a haystack, literally. Indeed it would have been a miracle to see one. Well, I did pray for that miracle. I think the trouble is that my prayers were canceled out by my sons’ prayers, because he was praying that we would NOT see a wolf. And I am quite sure that God likes him much more than me. haha! Ah well, we did not see the wolf of course, but we sure did have a very nice hike together, along with our old dog, Kaya, who also made the trek with us, and I think she probably enjoyed it the best of all of us.

In other news, we are getting our first snow of the year here. Whoopie! It looks like we’ll get about 2 feet of snow or more in the mountains this week. That is pretty amazing for October. Here’s to a great winter (I hope!).

This is Swift Creek Falls in the Trinity Alps. I took this image when I was last up in northern California at the beginning of May for the grand opening of the Western Captures Gallery and Gift Shop in Weed.  I have been to Swift Creek Falls before, and this was not supposed to be my primary destination of the day, but it is how things worked out.

I was trying to get to another waterfall which is on the same trail past Swift Creek Falls. I arrived at the trailhead in the dark and started my hike. I needed to start so early because the waterfall would be getting the early sun, and I needed to be there at sunrise to get a decent photograph. Swift Creek was certainly flowing very swiftly from the snowmelt, and I made my way past this waterfall and continued on. I climbed higher and higher in elevation and found snow on the trail, and a lot of it. I was surprised for sure because I was only at about 5000 ft. elevation. The snow was very soft as well, and I was sinking in big time. A short easy hike was now taking a long time, and I could see I would not likely make it to the other waterfall in time. I had two options: continue on, and get to the waterfall late, and miss out on the other two waterfalls I was hoping to photograph as well, or turn back, and still have time to photograph the other two falls. I decided on option B. The other two waterfalls were this one on Swift Creek and Kickapoo Falls. I was thinking Kickapoo would be really nice and it was actually the main waterfall that I really wanted to try to get to on this day. I did make it to Kickapoo but it was not flowing very well at all, so all in all it was a disappointing morning. In retrospect, I should not have turned back, and perhaps I could have made it to the first waterfall through the snow in time, but at least I did make it to a couple waterfalls.

A man was swept over 410 ft. high Feather Falls this past weekend. He slipped on the slick rocks above the falls and bye-bye. It is sad of course, but sometimes I just don’t understand why people do things like this. Why was he even close to the raging water?

Here are a couple links to the story:
http://www.redding.com/news/2012/apr/23/search-and-rescue-unable-find-body-chico-man-swept

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/51f98261ce7a41de80d11be14366efa3/CA–Waterfall-Death/

It is interesting to note though that some of the news articles I read about this incident used the very often cited and very incorrect height of 640 ft. for Feather Falls, but other news sites used the correct figure of 410 ft., which was my measurement. Feather Falls has often been touted as the 6th highest waterfall in the U.S., and at a height of 640 ft. I do not know where this number came from but it is certainly very wrong. It was myself who first determined that the correct height of the waterfall was 410 ft. This height has been confirmed now by one other group as well. So it is nice to know that some news sites did the proper research and were using my measurement (and the correct one) for this tragic news story. This is one reason why measuring waterfall heights is important.

By the way, the photo here is obviously not Feather Falls. It is Federal Falls, which is a very precise and very small 11 ft. high.