COLD AS ICE
It is shocking that I had never been to see White River Falls before. It is only a little bit out of the way on our normal route from California to Canada. It is a magnificent waterfall. You would think I would been here before now. The waterfall madman missing out on such a beauty? I have no excuses. But all is remedied now.
We had a good week in Canada visiting family. The kids got in a couple days of skiing at Red Mountain (the best ski hill in the world – of course I am biased). I rested my back all week and did not ski this year (that would have really killed off my back for sure), so I am pretty much all ready for El Nino now and for more hiking.
Speaking of El Nino, the El Nino storms have finally started in California. We finished December with a slightly above average snow pack (107% in the Central Sierra, and about 100% in the North) and slightly above average rainfall. The media was reporting 136% snow pack thus far; That is quite wrong and I am not sure where they got those figures from (did they just take one reading at one location in all of California? or did they just make it up?). So far in January, we are just seeing very weak storms, and there is nothing much better in the long range forecast; but we continue to pray we will see a lot of rain and snow for the rest of the winter.
Anyway it was a very cold day as we drove down from Canada. We got out of the car at Spokane and I nearly froze to death before I took five steps. I got back in the car and made the kids go in to get my coffee. Just kiddin.
We made good time and arrived at White River Falls State Park in the afternoon. It was a cloudy day (which is good, it was supposed to be sunny). The park was closed, and that meant we had to walk in from the road. I had promised the kids it would only be a half mile hike, but this added another half mile or so. Oops. Did I mention that it was a very cold day? Despite the closure, there were a lot of people there. It is a popular location and I expected some people there, but not quite so many. Well, we made it to the overlook, no one else was there at the moment, so I setup my camera and started taking photos. I was antsy and nervous because the kids were fooling around, playing near the cliff. I kept telling them to stay back from the edge. I suppose they were not really being unsafe, but I was being an over protective father, and Nekoda had already slipped twice on the ice that day (and according to her, broke both her knees). Speaking of being unsafe, I saw one person down below that had climbed up on the ice above the river edge to get up close to the waterfall. If he had slipped on that ice, he would have been in the river. I saw some other people that had climbed down the cliff from the overlook to get closer. That also seemed a bit much on the “too dangerous” side of things. The overlook is safe and it has a better view. Why kill yourself?
White River Falls is a drop dead gorgeous waterfall. Officially, actually two waterfalls. The lower one is called Celestial Falls (31 ft. high), the upper one is called White River Falls (79 ft. high). There is a third smaller waterfall as well, which we also went down to see. I am definitely glad we took the time to come here, even though all our body parts took a couple hours to thaw out once we got back to the car.