Leon Turnbull Photography

The weather is all twisted. Winter is supposedly well under way but definitely not for us here in northern CA. After a decent November we had nuthin in December, one of the driest Decembers ever. Initial reports indicated the wet weather would begin in January but now I’m still not seeing too much of anything in the long range forecasts, except for an occasional shower or two. We are probably looking at more dry weather through mid January. Of course we need the rain and snow for more than just the waterfalls. It is our lifeblood in California.

Well, not to be outdone by the dry weather I still wanted to go waterfallin on Christmas Eve on the way up north to visit family. The original plan was to hit Feather Falls, but I just happened to see on dreamflows that PG&E was releasing huge amounts of water in the Pit River and that meant that Pit River Falls would be flowing. Indeed it should be utterly spectacular. Even though it is a four hour drive from my house it would be well worth it and I was going north for Christmas anyway. So up I got at 2:30am and started driving north. I arrived at the Pit River overlook at 7am. Pit River Falls was NOT utterly spectacular. What the hey? This was all twisted, it made no sense. At 5am the gage above Pit 1 Powerhouse was at above 20,000 cubic ft per second. That is mega water flow! But now at 7am it looked to be only at 500 or 600 cfs. What happened? Did they only bring the water level up for a short few minutes? Or was it some sort of error in the gage reading? I do not know. Neither one makes much sense. Well even at 500 cfs the river still has good flow, albeit not spectacular, and I had never been down to the bottom before (not to mention the very long drive out there), so I decided to continue the plan of hiking down to the falls.

If there was an actual well defined trail to the bottom then it would have been easy. There is no trail. There is a path that people have gone down before, but it is very overgrown, there are a lot of branches and twigs you need to walk over, the ground is very rocky and crumbly, and the slope is steep. About 2/3 of the way down I slipped on that crumbly slope and fell, severely twisting my ankle. I heard a pop sound as I fell. Oh oh. It was definitely not broken but it was not good. What should I do? I sat down and recovered myself for five minutes then I decided it was not (and would not be) a show stopper. I continued down to the falls, slowly and gingerly. It was not that bad but I was limping and not putting much weight on the ankle. Coming back up the mountain afterwards was harder but I still made it without too much difficulty. The worst part was the next day, when I was in quite a lot more pain and hobbling around the house worse than my mother in law’s 16 year old cat.

But I made it down successfully to Pit River Falls. The waterfall was nice and with less flow it was easy to climb around on the rocks beside the falls. There were a lot of photo opportunities and I took plenty of photos. Without knowing what the heck was going on with the gage reading I was a bit worried about this, wondering how safe it was down there, and what would happen if they suddenly released a truckload of water over the falls. I watched the river carefully always making sure I had a quick escape route. All in all, it was an enjoyable morning despite the pain, and if you are wondering how my ankle is now, it recovered quite well enough to get back out on the trails on Tuesday.