Leon Turnbull Photography

If you can’t trust the weather man, who can you trust? Whenever I go out hiking, I always check the weather beforehand. I find that accuweather.com usually has a fairly accurate forecast for the most part. Well, not this day. It was supposed to be a cloudy day, with the “light” rain showers on Friday all done with by Saturday morning. Well, I woke up in Folsom at 5AM, and found out it was still showering out. Okay, well, that’s not too bad. It would probably be fine by the time I started my hike. Up in Nevada City, my destination for the day, it was not just showering, it was “raining”. That was not on the agenda for today, let me tell you. Oh well, I don’t mind hiking in the rain. I just don’t like trying to take photos in the rain. It is rather difficult to keep water off the lens, while composing the image and taking the photo. The rain showers were off and on during my hike down to Humbug Creek Falls. But by the time I got to the waterfall, it was raining again. Hmm, okay, this will be fun trying to take a photo of this waterfall. I think I managed all right, though. It wasn’t really raining too hard, but it was a bit of a challenge.

It was quite difficult getting down to the base of the falls though. I had been here before 5 years ago, and I knew it was steep, but I thought it was do-able to get down to the falls. Well, it was steep for sure. The last part was down a steep section of slippery rock. The only way down to the bottom was on my bum. It wasn’t too far, so I wasn’t worried about hurting myself. But I was a bit worried about climbing back up on the slippery rocks. I might still be stuck down there, but I made it, and it wasn’t too hard after all.

After going to Humbug Creek Falls, I wanted to try to find a new waterfall on Kenebec Creek, which is along the same road to Malakoff Diggins State Park (Humbug Creek). A couple people had told me about one there, but the directions I had were not adequate. I found the creek all right, but it was a very small creek with hardly any water in it, despite all the rain. I also could not see any waterfall. I was expecting to see the waterfall from the road, but there was none to be seen. I saw where there could be a waterfall, as the creek seemed to drop quite steeply. But I could not see the creek at this point, it was too far off the road, and I could see no easy way down to it anyway. So if there is a waterfall there, it remains a mystery for now.