Leon Turnbull Photography

You are forgiven if you think this is Phantom Falls on Table Mountain (my previous post). It is not, but it does look eerily similar to its more famous neighbor. Flag Falls is about 1.5 miles further past Phantom Falls, and is not really too difficult to reach. The hard part was crossing the creek above Phantom Falls, which was flowing pretty well. I managed to cross without getting my feet wet though. After that, the terrain levels out and it is mostly flat cross country over to Flag Canyon. You can see Flag Falls from quite a distance away, and it is an easy jaunt up to this lookout close to the falls. I sat on a rock outcrop eating my lunch and enjoying the view. Flag Falls is a bit smaller (105 ft. high) than Phantom Falls, but it is another very beautiful plunging waterfall.

For directions and more info on this waterfall, click here:

http://www.waterfallswest.com/waterfall.php?id=957

On Wednesday, I headed up to Oroville to check out some waterfalls on north Table Mountain. It was “supposed” to be rainy in the morning, but cloudy with showers in the afternoon. Well, I arrived in Oroville in the late morning and it was sunny! Sun may be a very welcome thing for most people, but not for the photographer. I had a big hike planned to see multiple waterfalls, and I really needed it to be cloudy to get some decent shots. Well, I started my hike anyway, first heading straight to Phantom Falls, undoubtedly the prime jewel of the many waterfalls on Table Mountain.  It was sunny when I arrived there, but I did take a quick snap anyway. I have never seen so much water flowing over this waterfall. It was amazingly spectacular. If you look closely, you can see it dropping in three separate segments. Normally, this waterfall is just a thin ribbon of water plunging over the cliff in a single segment. But not right now. Wow, what an amazing sight to see this one at high flow.

After stopping at the overlook for Phantom Falls, I continued on my 10 mile hike, past Phantom Falls. I was wondering how easy it was going to be to cross the creek above Phantom Falls. I was barely able to jump across the creeks for Hollow and Ravine Falls. I was sure I would need to get my feet wet at Phantom. And indeed, the creek was flowing wide and deep, a jump across would not be the wisest course of action on this day. However, after a little bit of scavenging upstream, I came to a fallen tree laying in the water. I managed to, with difficulty, hop onto a shaky log resting in the middle of the stream, then hop across to the other side, all without getting my feet too wet. It was interesting, but better than taking my boots off and wading across, and it was more fun this way as well.

I continued on to the two other “new” waterfalls (for which I will post photos later). When I got to them, the clouds had rolled back in over the area. So thank the Lord, I had my overcast skies back, and I was able to get good shots of all these waterfalls. The overcastness lasted the rest of the day, and when I got back to Phantom Falls, I had good lighting. I wanted to try to get some shots from the other, non-standard, side of the canyon. This view is different and unique. Just don’t look down. Across the canyon, I could see some other people at the main viewpoint. I think I heard one of them whoop for joy when they first came into view of the waterfall (and as I found out later, he is one of my Facebook contacts – haha, small world).

I really find this entire area incredibly fascinating. The canyons on Table Mountain are incredibly deep, the dropoffs are so sheer, and the landscape so very interesting. It is so neat how all the little gullies which start off as a gentle depression in the ground, then all of a sudden drop into a very steep canyon. They all have little streams flowing in them (in the rainy season), and many of them form large waterfalls, even the small streams. And interestingly, since the terrain is so similar, most of the waterfalls on Table Mountain have very similar form as well.  It is really a very amazing place.

Here’s another view of beautiful snow and ice filled Shackleford Falls. Aren’t those icicles hanging down so totally cool?

I was standing up on a big rock to get this viewpoint. If it wasn’t so freezing, I wouldn’t mind standing more in the creek to get a shot here. haha.

This is Johnson Creek Falls near Etna. My friend Brian was initially the person who told me about this one. You will not find this one mentioned in any of the CA waterfall books. Yet it is certainly a well traveled waterfall among the locals. The Etnans (or Etnanites? Etnatonians?) have done a pretty good job of keeping this one a secret from me until now.

The waterfall is technically on private property. But there is a sign indicating that the trail is open to the public for hikers. That is definitely the kind of sign I love to see. It has been this way for a long time, and obviously the locals come here rather frequently, and are no doubt respectful of the landowners’ property. Thank you, people of Etna, and especially to the owners of this property.

It is not a very easy waterfall to get to. It is only a 1 mile hike, but it is a very strenuous 1 mile. The trail climbs up and up and up to the top of the waterfall. It is a very steep hike, and once at the top of the falls, you are treated to an obscured view of the waterfall across the canyon. I measured the falls to be 118 ft. high, though it really could be higher than that (but if there is more above, then it is not viewable). From this viewpoint, it is necessary to scramble down to the bottom if you want to get a better up close and personal view. It is a very steep and difficult descent. It is also slippery and dangerous if the ground is wet (which it certainly was with the snow around). I managed to get down to the bottom, then cross to the other side of the creek to take my photos. From this low point, you can only see part of the entire waterfall (actually, about 71 ft. of the total 118 ft. height can be seen from the bottom). I imagine that in the spring it would be extremely wet down there from the spray of the falls. This time of year though presented another difficulty: falling ice. While I was down there standing in the middle of the creek taking photos, ice was falling down the waterfall. I was a safe distance away, but it was something that made me a bit wary. I did not stay down there too long.

On Black Friday, I was excited about trying to hike to Maple Falls in the Marble Mountains Wilderness. At 4200 ft. elevation though, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to due to snow. As I drove up I-5 towards Yreka, I found that there was quite a bit of snow around Dunsmuir (about 2500 ft. elevation). At that point I was about resigned to abandon my idea. If there was this much snow at Dunsmuir, how much more would be at Maple Falls? Yet in Yreka (a higher elevation), there was no snow at all. Hmmm, maybe I could do this after all. So I drove out to the Maple Falls trailhead. At 2400 ft. elevation, there was no snow at the trailhead. It was a 4 mile hike to the falls, and I would be climbing all the way to 4200 ft. That makes for a tough hike, even with no snow.

As I climbed the trail, I began to wonder if this was such a great idea after all. At about 3000 ft., I started to see some snow on the trail. Nothing too much yet. At 3200 ft., there was a lot more snow on the trail, but it was still off and on, and only a couple inches, so nothing to be concerned about. Then at 3400 ft., I was trudging completely through the snow. I was about halfway to the falls at this point, and it was still only a few inches deep. I came this far, surely I could make it the rest of the way. It would be dumb to turn back now. Or would it? At 3800 ft. elevation, I was now walking through 6 inches deep snow. I was following deer tracks up the trail. Surely if the deer could do this, then so could I. Right? I was almost there. I was not turning back now. That would be really dumb. Then I saw the hill for the last half mile of the hike. It went straight up the side of the mountain. By 4000 ft. elevation, I was clambering through a foot of snow on the trail. But then a new problem presented itself. The waterfall was not in the right spot as it was labeled on the USGS topo maps. It turned out that it was actually another half mile further than it was supposed to be. That is another half mile of very difficult trekking up a mountain through deep snow. I had intentionally left my snow shoes back in the car because I knew I would have been carrying them for most of the hike, and I did not want to carry them for most of a 8 mile hike (or as it turned out, 9 miles). By 4200 ft. elevation, I was hiking through 2 feet of snow now. Finally, I could see the waterfall across the canyon. But there is not a good view of the falls from the trail. So now what? I climbed all the way up here, and I cannot even get a picture of the falls? The only thing I could do was scramble down the very steep and treacherous slope to try to find a viewpoint of the falls lower down. So that is what I did, very carefully, checking my footing with each step. I at last managed to get down to a point where I could take a photo of the falls. It is not a great one, no doubt. In the summer, I think you could get a lot closer to the falls, but this is the best I could do, under the circumstances. It also is not nearly so big as I had been informed. It was supposed to be a 60 ft. high waterfall, but I measured it as 33 ft. high. It was not very impressive, and I wasn’t too happy about coming out here all this way in the snow. But at least I made it, and although I was very tired at the end, it was still a great Black Friday hike out in the wilderness.

ONE MORE IMPORTANT NOTE:

Effective Dec. 1, 2010, my website (waterfallswest.com) is changing over to be a subscription based site. The extensive waterfall information I provide on the site is no longer free (for California, Hawaii, BC, and Oregon only). Why am I doing this now? The reason is simple: it takes a lot of time and effort and money for me to maintain the website as a free service to everyone, and I provide a lot of information on the site, and am continually adding new waterfalls to the site. I now have visited over 500 waterfalls in the western U.S. and Canada. I need some compensation to offset these costs in order to keep the web site up and running. I am only asking for $15/year for a basic subscription, which is not very much at all. I hope you will agree and contribute a small fee to help maintain this website and help keep it going into the future. Please see the following page for more info:

http://www.waterfallswest.com/page.php?id=faq

It is worth noting that I have more than 530 waterfalls on my site now that I have visited, and this includes over 300 California waterfalls. All these will be included in the Basic subscription (for now, states other than California, Hawaii, BC, and Oregon will remain free). In addition to this, I have added over 170 select California waterfalls that I have not yet visited, and these also will be included in the Basic subscription (these are mostly from southern California, and other areas in CA that I have not yet visited). So that is about 470 California waterfalls that will be part of the Basic subscription. But I have catalogued over 1200 waterfalls in my database throughout all of California, and all these remaining 700+ waterfalls will be included in a Premium subscription to my site ($35/year). So you will have access to over 1200 waterfalls throughout the state of California, and all information that I have about them (including GPS co-ordinates). That is far and away a much more extensive listing of CA waterfalls than you will find anywhere else, either on-line or in print.