Leon Turnbull Photography

On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to take the afternoon off work to go hiking. That might sound like a very good thing, but it is not really. The only reason I could do this is because I was scheduled to work this weekend, Friday night, and likely Saturday too. That is just the life of an I.T. person. Every once in awhile, you have to work off hours. It was nice though, that my boss let me off Wednesday afternoon since I’d be working on the weekend. But as it turned out, our project implementation got delayed by a couple weeks. I found this out on Thursday. So I was able to go hiking on Saturday also.

And now is the time to get out and see the waterfalls. We had about 2 straight weeks of rain at the beginning of February, very much needed here in California. It was enough to get us back to average snow levels for the year after a very dry January. All this rain means the waterfalls are flowing wonderfully right now.

I only had the afternoon, so I couldn’t go anywhere too far away. I wanted to go back to American Canyon Creek in Auburn, and see how that waterfall looked when the creek is flowing high. So that is what I did. The trail down to the falls is very pleasant, and not too difficult considering you lose about 1000 ft. in elevation. There are two creeks to cross before you get to the falls. Normally simple rock hops, they were a bit tricky with so much water flow. I got across both of them and only got my boots slightly wet. Once down at the falls, I saw that the light was not very good, as it was still early in the afternoon. I had some time, so I decided to continue on down to the river, and come back to photograph the falls on my way back up. That involved another creek crossing. This time there would be no rock hopping, I’d have to wade. But wait, there was a log going across the creek. Maybe I could walk across the creek on the log. It really freaks me out trying to cross raging creeks on (slippery) logs, with the creek flowing swiftly beneath my feet. But I really didn’t want to take my boots off, so I tried it, and made it without falling in the drink. As I continued on down the trail, I found some pretty little cascades to stop and photograph along the creek. The creek drops pretty steeply here, and there are actually more waterfalls along here, including a couple of significant drops. I managed to find a way down to one of them. Pictures of it will be forthcoming. After photographing these cascades, it was getting late, so I didn’t end up going all the way to the river, but instead went back up the trail, across the log and up to American Canyon Creek Falls.

In order to see this waterfall, you have to get across the creek. With the creek flowing high, there was no way to rock hop across it. Fortunately, I anticipated this beforehand, and I brought my water shoes with me. I put them on, and was able to carefully wade across the raging creek.

American Canyon Creek Falls is only 15 ft. high, but is perhaps the coolest little waterfall in the greater Sacramento area. It is nestled back in a very narrow rock gorge, dropping into a pretty little pool. You have to kinda tilt your head at a weird angle to see it back in the gorge, but it is so very gorgeous. However, I kinda thought that with the high creek flow, it would be much more spectacular than it was. In fact, I think this waterfall is actually better when the creek is low. The reason I think is that the pool is much prettier in lower flows, instead of when it is just a torrent of rushing water. But nonetheless, it was still pretty darn cool. I definitely had a fabulous afternoon hiking.