BONK. AKA NOT ON ALLTRAILS
So what is your favorite season? Mine is spring. That may surprise you. Maybe you thought I preferred winter? Well I do like winter, but in spring, the weather is warmer, the snow is melting, and the waterfalls in the high country are roaring. It is time to get out hiking and enjoy them! It will be a very short season this year, unfortunately. As of April 1, the snow pack is at 71% of normal (northern CA), 68% (central Sierra), 46% (southern Sierra). Rain is at 52% (north), 54% (central), 40% (south). It has been a dismal year. This is the second year in a row of drought. Are we heading back into a prolonged drought period again? I sure hope not. Please pray for much rain next year.
The snow is just starting to melt now so I wanted to head up into a higher elevation this week, above 4000 ft. Well, I ended up being a bit below 4000 and unfortunately that meant more poison oak. Sigh.
For this hike, I first saw this waterfall about 12 years ago. I climbed up on the opposite ridge and could only see an obscured long distance view of it. In retrospect, I have no idea why I even bothered to climb the ridge because I should have known it would not be a good view. Since that time I’ve been wondering how I could get close to it, if it was even possible. I had some ideas. The King Fire in 2014 put a delay into those plans, though as it turned out I should have tried to do this one a couple years ago. (keep reading and I will explain).
You won’t be finding this hike on AllTrails. I find it funny that people will only look on AllTrails and nowhere else for hikes. Not every hike is on it! I have so many hikes on waterfallswest.com that you will not find on any other site. This one is not easy, however. The hike is 6 miles one way with an elevation loss of about 1600 ft., so it is similar to the Upper Shirttail Creek Falls hike I did a couple weeks ago, yet this one was much much harder. The last part is a big drop of 500 ft. down to the creek (again, similar to Shirttail). It took a full hour to get down to the bottom. It was hard! The brush after the King Fire has now grown up immensely. It was very brushy, especially near the top of the ridge. At first, I thought I was done for. There is no way I was getting through all that brush, but I persevered and I found a path. It was very steep and there were a lot of fallen trees from the fire. I had to be careful with that but the brush was still the biggest problem. The brush got better near the bottom but that is where the poison oak made a presence (in abundance). I really wanted to be done with the poison oak for this year. Sign. Maybe next week.
I finally made it down to the creek and the bottom of the main section of the waterfall, a magnificent 161 ft. drop. Onion Creek Falls is absolutely glorious! It was so awesome finally getting up close to this beauty and well worth the effort. But I still had to climb back up the mountain. It was 5PM and it took an hour to climb back up to the road. I was planning to eat my dinner back at the road but I should have eaten at the bottom. I almost bonked. The climb was so incredibly difficult. I rested when I got back up to the road and tried to eat. Now I still had 5 miles to hike and another 1100 ft. to get back to the car. It was well after dark when I finally got back (almost 9PM!), so it was much later than I had hoped and I almost bonked again as I finished the hike. This was a killer tough hike. Was it worth it? Heck yes. It was an awesome day in Eldorado National Forest.