Leon Turnbull Photography

Not much happening with me this past weekend. On Sunday afternoon, after church, I took some friends to see how good old Bassi Falls was behaving these days. This was the Pastor of another church with his wife and daughter and one of their friends. I dragged my son Jadon along for the ride as well (kicking and screaming?).

So what is the deal with the Bassi Falls trail now? I’m sure you are all wondering about it, just like myself. The USFS website indicates the road should be open now, but it is still gated at Ice House Rd. What I really am wondering about is now there is a new “permanent” sign saying no motor vehicles are allowed on the road. This leads me to think it may be gated permanently. I guess we will find out in another month or so. There is also a new trail to Bassi Falls now, which has been just opened in the last year or so. I had never taken this trail before, but we took it this time. It is 2 miles and is quite an easy trail. It is well signed and easy to follow for the most part. However, the old trail was only a half mile long, so compared to that, it is not so easy. Everything is relative, right?

I have mixed feelings about all this. On the one hand, you would think that if the trail is harder then less people will go to see Bassi Falls. This would be a good thing because Bassi Falls is a complete madhouse on the weekends in the spring and early summer. Less people would mean the Bassi Falls experience will be much more pleasant. However, the reality is that an easy 2 mile trail is not going to keep anyone away. Even this weekend, on a stormy Sunday afternoon in April, and in very early season, there were a lot of people at Bassi Falls, despite the extended walking required. Half of the people did not even know about the new trail, so they had to walk up the old road to the old trailhead. That is much tougher, but they still did it. Also, hiking 2 miles vs. a half mile makes it much more difficult to see Bassi Falls at sunrise or sunset, when the light is at the best. But I did find one interesting surprise on hiking this new trail. I will talk more about that later.

I felt very tired on the hike. As I said, it is an easy 4 mile (round trip) hike. Elevation gain is minimal. I hope it was just because it was a warm, sunny, Sunday afternoon. Normally I just relax on Sunday afternoons, and thus I was not mentally prepared to do any hiking. I have a big trip coming up in a couple weeks, and I will be hiking 7-10 miles per day for about a week. How am I going to do a 10 mile hike every day with 3000 ft. elevation gain when I cannot do a 4 mile hike with 200 ft. elevation gain? Oh boy. Can’t wait to find out.

I have already said the weather was stormy and also that it was warm and sunny. Did you catch that? So what was it man? Make up your mind. It was both! I swear the weather literally was changing every two minutes. It was raining, then two minutes later it was sunny, then it was cloudy, then it was sunny, then raining. It was crazy weather. All in all though, the light was not too great, and I’m not excited about the photos I got this time. But it did not matter much, I was not there to take photos.

The falls were flowing quite well and strong with snow melt. Everyone was happy. One fun thing about Bassi Falls is trying to get up closer to it, which requires you to walk through the extremely cold creek. This is easy enough to do, and Jadon and I worked our way onto a big rock up close to the falls. But the daughter of my friend and their other friend went a lot further, jumping across into the very middle of the creek onto some more big rocks. The problem is that this was extremely dangerous. The creek is raging. If you slipped and fell into the creek, you would be swept downstream. It may be fun to jump over to the middle in front of the falls, but it’s not worth it! I told the girl to be extremely careful, it is dangerous, but that was all I could really say. Her parents were off somewhere else and not watching. I couldn’t make her not do it, but I could make my son not do it, and I told him he would not be following her, but he said “don’t worry daddy, I have no intention whatsoever of going over there”. Ok whew, he is definitely a smart kid. Anyhow, the two of them made it ok. They just gave me a little heart attack, that is all.