Leon Turnbull Photography

So some of you may wonder why I almost always hike alone. Well there are many reasons but here is one … Often I strike out on my hikes and do not find any waterfalls. It happens fairly often because I am usually hiking in places where people rarely (if ever) hike, and trying to find new waterfalls that very few people (if any) have ever been to before. I run into countless obstacles: confounding brush, raging rivers, impassable snow, death defying cliffs, crazy sasquatches, you name it. I would hate taking anyone on a hike and end up not getting to any waterfall for whatever reason. If they told me they didn’t mind I wouldn’t believe them. Even if I knew them and that they really didn’t mind I still would feel bad dragging someone out on a difficult hike and not finding any falls (and that has happened more than once). It’s better if I go by myself and do all the dirty work for you.

Take this past weekend as a good example: my initial plan was to go on a new hike somewhere up Foresthill Rd. The Tahoe NF website does not keep up with their road condition status very well at all but I thought maybe I’d be able to drive up there since there has not been all that much snow yet. I did not even make it to Mumford Bar before I encountered too much snow to continue. The big problem was that the road was completely ice, the temperature was about 20 degrees. There was no chance I’d get anywhere near I hoped to. Plan B was to try hiking down into Humbug Canyon where I thought there might be a waterfall. I was not certain but I figured there’d be at least a small one. I actually did not think I’d get even anywhere close to the creek. It just looked far too brushy on Google Earth. Worth a try though. As it turned out getting down to the creek was easy (well, as easy as a 1500 ft descent can be). I found a very old trail which pretty much went all the way down to the bottom. Was it an old mining trail? I think it must’ve been. At the bottom, however, all I found was a big cliff dropoff  and no waterfall. Not even a small one. There was perhaps a ten footer and a couple smaller cascades. That’s it. No way to get down all the way to the creek either without killing myself. No photos taken. It was definitely not worth killing oneself for a 10 foot waterfall.

Here is another shot of Canyon Creek Falls from last month. She’s a beauty.

So you think we had a lot of precipitation in December, do you? I know the media was saying this before Christmas. Well, the official December tally from the NOAA indicates the truth: we are only at 45% of normal for our snowpack in the Southern/Central Sierra, and 55% for the northern Sierra. That is WAY BELOW average. We did have warmer precipitation earlier in December which did not add to the snow pack, but the overall precipitation was also below average and the rain did not do much of anything for our reservoirs. Folsom is currently at about 45% capacity, and Shasta/Oroville are 40% capacity, and this is also way below average. The worst part of all this is that we have been mostly dry for a couple weeks now and from what I have read the long range forecast for the rest of January is looking extremely bleak, barring a miracle (which I’m still hoping for). This will make it 8 out of the last 9 Januarys being dry months, and now we are seriously looking at the possibility of a fourth year in a row of far below average snow pack. But we still have February and March. Don’t give up hope yet.

This is 18 ft. high Fiddle Creek Falls, and it was still flowing quite strongly when I was here. A nice little falls right alongside the road. I would not have gone out of my way to stop here since I have been here before, but it was not out of my way, so thus I stopped! The flume at the top is interesting. When I was first here years ago, I thought it was just an ugly thing that needed to go away. Now I am torn. On the one hand, I wish it was not here, but the more I see of this waterfall, the more I think the flume is very much part of its character. It’s like the log across Lion Slide Falls or the ones at Russian Gulch Falls. Fiddle Creek Falls would just be naked without the flume there.

So here is my tally for the Christmas holidays of 2014: 5 hikes, 8 waterfalls (6 new ones, 1 old one, 1 sort-of-new one), 30 miles of hiking, 4000 ft. elevation of climbing (at least), one very bad case of poison oak, one injured rib cartilage. Not too shabby. The worst thing was the oak (ugh!). The best thing was Cherokee Creek Falls (see my last post).

This one, however, was a very pleasant surprise: Wet Ravine Falls, 33 ft. high. I found it right alongside the road as I was driving back down the hill from Cherokee Creek. I had no idea there was a waterfall here beforehand, but there it was, and for such a small creek, it was flowing quite nicely. Easy to get up close to, but a bit difficult to photograph.

I found it quite strange that some creeks in the Downieville area were flowing very strong, and others nearby had hardly any water in them at all. That was disappointing in some respects because I had hoped to get to see some more falls in the area that day. Wet Ravine was a nice surprise though, as I wouldn’t have thought this would be flowing at all. Sweet.

On Christmas Eve I headed up to Downieville. My goal: Attempt to get down to the monster waterfall on Cherokee Creek.

I had little hope for success. On Google Earth, it looked incredibly steep, cliffy, brushy, and it did not look like there were any open views to the waterfall. It was worth a shot though, of course. 😉

I arrived at first light. It was steep but not cliffy or brushy (yet). There was a lot of poison oak on the descent, however. Once again though, I seemed to have managed to avoid getting the big itch. I’ve been doing well at that lately (knock on wood). I continued the descent, deftly avoiding touching anything of the oak variety. I came to the spot where I hoped I could get a view of the thing, on top of a cliff overlook. Oh, but there were just too many trees in the way. It was so close. It would have been a magnificent view point if it were completely open. If I hung my body out over the cliff, whilst holding onto a flimsy tree branch, then I could get a pretty clear view (but uh, no thank you on that one). I thought I was done for, and there would be no further entry down the mountain. But then I saw that I could continue down further without any death defying maneuvers necessary. Just a little further down and I came to this spot with a clear view of Cherokee Creek Falls. This plunge shown here is 79 ft. high. Just as I got here the fog rolled in, completely obscuring my view of the waterfall. But I absolutely could not leave here without a good decent photo. So I waited. And I waited. And I waited. Finally, the fog cleared slightly. Just enough to take a decent photo.

There is a lower tier of this waterfall, about the same height as the upper tier. I was able to continue further down the mountain, but I could not find any clear spots to photograph the lower tier. The terrain got too cliffy to go much further, so I headed back up the mountain. I still had more waterfalls I wanted to visit this morning and I had already taken much longer than I wanted at Cherokee Creek, but it was worth it. What a magnificent waterfall.

This is Little Hollow Falls, 30 ft. high. It doesn’t really compare to all the big waterfalls on Table Mountain, but it is a nice little thing, and easy to get to.