Leon Turnbull Photography

On Black Friday, I was excited about trying to hike to Maple Falls in the Marble Mountains Wilderness. At 4200 ft. elevation though, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to due to snow. As I drove up I-5 towards Yreka, I found that there was quite a bit of snow around Dunsmuir (about 2500 ft. elevation). At that point I was about resigned to abandon my idea. If there was this much snow at Dunsmuir, how much more would be at Maple Falls? Yet in Yreka (a higher elevation), there was no snow at all. Hmmm, maybe I could do this after all. So I drove out to the Maple Falls trailhead. At 2400 ft. elevation, there was no snow at the trailhead. It was a 4 mile hike to the falls, and I would be climbing all the way to 4200 ft. That makes for a tough hike, even with no snow.

As I climbed the trail, I began to wonder if this was such a great idea after all. At about 3000 ft., I started to see some snow on the trail. Nothing too much yet. At 3200 ft., there was a lot more snow on the trail, but it was still off and on, and only a couple inches, so nothing to be concerned about. Then at 3400 ft., I was trudging completely through the snow. I was about halfway to the falls at this point, and it was still only a few inches deep. I came this far, surely I could make it the rest of the way. It would be dumb to turn back now. Or would it? At 3800 ft. elevation, I was now walking through 6 inches deep snow. I was following deer tracks up the trail. Surely if the deer could do this, then so could I. Right? I was almost there. I was not turning back now. That would be really dumb. Then I saw the hill for the last half mile of the hike. It went straight up the side of the mountain. By 4000 ft. elevation, I was clambering through a foot of snow on the trail. But then a new problem presented itself. The waterfall was not in the right spot as it was labeled on the USGS topo maps. It turned out that it was actually another half mile further than it was supposed to be. That is another half mile of very difficult trekking up a mountain through deep snow. I had intentionally left my snow shoes back in the car because I knew I would have been carrying them for most of the hike, and I did not want to carry them for most of a 8 mile hike (or as it turned out, 9 miles). By 4200 ft. elevation, I was hiking through 2 feet of snow now. Finally, I could see the waterfall across the canyon. But there is not a good view of the falls from the trail. So now what? I climbed all the way up here, and I cannot even get a picture of the falls? The only thing I could do was scramble down the very steep and treacherous slope to try to find a viewpoint of the falls lower down. So that is what I did, very carefully, checking my footing with each step. I at last managed to get down to a point where I could take a photo of the falls. It is not a great one, no doubt. In the summer, I think you could get a lot closer to the falls, but this is the best I could do, under the circumstances. It also is not nearly so big as I had been informed. It was supposed to be a 60 ft. high waterfall, but I measured it as 33 ft. high. It was not very impressive, and I wasn’t too happy about coming out here all this way in the snow. But at least I made it, and although I was very tired at the end, it was still a great Black Friday hike out in the wilderness.

ONE MORE IMPORTANT NOTE:

Effective Dec. 1, 2010, my website (waterfallswest.com) is changing over to be a subscription based site. The extensive waterfall information I provide on the site is no longer free (for California, Hawaii, BC, and Oregon only). Why am I doing this now? The reason is simple: it takes a lot of time and effort and money for me to maintain the website as a free service to everyone, and I provide a lot of information on the site, and am continually adding new waterfalls to the site. I now have visited over 500 waterfalls in the western U.S. and Canada. I need some compensation to offset these costs in order to keep the web site up and running. I am only asking for $15/year for a basic subscription, which is not very much at all. I hope you will agree and contribute a small fee to help maintain this website and help keep it going into the future. Please see the following page for more info:

http://www.waterfallswest.com/page.php?id=faq

It is worth noting that I have more than 530 waterfalls on my site now that I have visited, and this includes over 300 California waterfalls. All these will be included in the Basic subscription (for now, states other than California, Hawaii, BC, and Oregon will remain free). In addition to this, I have added over 170 select California waterfalls that I have not yet visited, and these also will be included in the Basic subscription (these are mostly from southern California, and other areas in CA that I have not yet visited). So that is about 470 California waterfalls that will be part of the Basic subscription. But I have catalogued over 1200 waterfalls in my database throughout all of California, and all these remaining 700+ waterfalls will be included in a Premium subscription to my site ($35/year). So you will have access to over 1200 waterfalls throughout the state of California, and all information that I have about them (including GPS co-ordinates). That is far and away a much more extensive listing of CA waterfalls than you will find anywhere else, either on-line or in print.