Leon Turnbull Photography

After work on Wednesday I drove up north to visit the in-laws for the weekend. I wanted to hike not only on Black Friday (as I do every year), but also on Thanksgiving Day. Just like Walmart, I am now expanding into the previous day to maximize my profits – in my case, it is waterfall viewing profits, not monetary profits. I did not have a lot of time on Thursday morning. I had to be in Redding by 10:30AM for Thanksgiving lunch/dinner. Who eats lunch at 10:30AM? Only my family of course.

Anyway, I chose to go to Montgomery Creek, just east of Redding, and was hoping to find at least one new waterfall out in that area. First problem I realized after I arrived at the in-laws on Wednesday evening, and it was a disaster. I left my GPS back home. Oh crikey. My GPS is my life-blood. It is absolutely essential for finding new waterfalls. With my GPS, I can get to a lot of places that are well off the beaten path, through forest and brush without any trails to lead me. But without it, I will likely have too much trouble just finding the trailhead, let alone avoid getting completely lost.

Oh what to do, what to do. Awhile back, I bought an iPhone topo map app. I only used it once to try it out, and I did not like it. My handheld GPS is just far superior to any iPhone app in every conceivable way. Well, I dusted it off (fortunately I had not deleted it), and downloaded some topo maps of the Montgomery Creek area before I left the house on Thursday morning. Hopefully with this app, I could find the trailhead, as well as get down to the waterfall.

I had another problem as well, and this was even worse than no GPS. I left my camera’s memory cards back at home as well. I only had a single 1GB card with me. This would not allow me to take very many photos. I would have to be very judicious about what photos I took over the course of the next two days.

My goal was to get down into Bear Canyon and find the waterfall on this creek dumping into Shasta Lake. I was able to find the spot where I thought I needed to start hiking, and made the descent into the canyon with my dumb little iPhone app. There was much brush and much poison oak, and once I got down into the canyon I got turned around and could not tell which way to go. Oh how I would have loved my handheld GPS! To make things worse, the terrain down there was very confusing anyway, and I was definitely afraid of getting lost. At one point the creek was on my right, and then all of a sudden it seemed to be on my left and going the opposite direction. I did manage to figure out what was going on with the terrain, but I realized it was just too brushy to get down to the waterfall. Even if I had my GPS, I could not have done it. This was not the right spot to go down. Strike out.

I got back to my car, and then went on to Potem Falls, just a short distance away. Unfortunately, by the time I arrived at Potem Falls, it was already in the sun. Potem gets the sun very early in the morning. I should have known this. I should have gone to Potem first, then try Bear Canyon afterwards. On the plus side, Potem Falls was really rocking, thanks to the recent rains. The flow was above average, and there was a lot of mist at the bottom of the falls. It was spectacular. I am not happy with the photo, due to the sun on the falls, but here it is for you anyway.

On the way back to Redding, I also found a better way down into Bear Canyon, which hopefully would allow me to get down to the waterfall there. Would I try it again the next day? Or go somewhere else? Stay tuned to find out.

I got out hiking three times over the long Thanksgiving weekend. I struck out wildly on Thursday and Friday in my search for new waterfalls. By Sunday, I was in desperate need of getting to at least some new waterfall. But it had to be an easy one.

I will talk more later about my Thursday and Friday strike outs. I have at least one photo to share from those outings. But for now I wanted to share this photo from Sunday morning first. Because by golly this is a pretty little waterfall, though it is a small one.

The reason for the easy hike on Sunday is because I was hiking with my dog all weekend. She is very old. She is a gamer and goes where-ever, but I think I pushed her a little too hard on Thursday and Friday, unintentionally of course, but that is what happens to me when I go waterfall hunting. Things are never as easy as I plan or expect. So for Sunday, I needed an easy hike, and even as such, this turned out to be a bit harder than I expected. I was also hoping my son would join me on this hike, but he opted out, stating lack of appropriate hiking gear available to him up at Nana and Papa’s house.

It is less than a mile hike over to Waters Gulch in Shasta Trinity National Forest, a small stream dumping into Lake Shasta. I had heard there was a waterfall on this creek, and I was hoping it was flowing well, since the other creeks in the area seemed to be going at a good clip, thanks to recent rain in the past week. Actually I was just hoping I could get to it and photograph it.

I found the waterfall all right, and it was easy enough to get down to the bottom of it, and easy for Kaya as well. It was smaller than I anticipated, though its actual height will depend on how it is measured. I have not decided if I should count the upper tier as part of the waterfall’s height or not (oh, the complications). Anyway, the bottom tier is the prettiest, and is shown here. The waterfall flow was much lower than I hoped. I think at high flow, this would be a really nice one overall, but not so much at lower flows. A local cougar apparently likes dining here also. I found an old bone and what was left over of some small animal beside the waterfall. Hmmm. Thankfully, the cougar was not waiting around to catch unsuspecting waterfall hunters.

After shooting the lower falls, I wanted to photograph the upper tier as well, and that meant climbing up to the top of this lower waterfall. Easy enough for me, but not so easy for Kaya. In her youth, she could bound up the rocks easily. But in her old age, she cannot. I lifted her up two big rock steps to get her to the top. However, once we got to the top, it suddenly occurred to me that I would not be able to get her back down the waterfall. There is no way she would let me carry her down. Phooey. I looked around in a moment of panic for an alternate exit. I found one. There was a path up the steep bank back up to the main trail. Through poison oak. I think I would have much preferred going back the same way, but for Kaya’s sake we went up through the oak instead. We made it safely and hopefully without the itch. It was a nice easy morning at Lake Shasta.

My rainy day started out looking for waterfalls on Monumental Creek. Instead I found this.

I learned about this location from the late Russell Towle, well off the beaten path, towering pinnacle rocks called the Monuments, from which the creek was most likely named. There are four or five of them in this area, and the largest one shown here in my photo is certainly over 100 feet high, rising right out of the creek bed; it is an amazingly phenomenal structure. I knew about these Monuments from Russell, but did not know exactly where they were. They were not hard to find even though it did require scrambling up a steep slope through very wet brush.

But I came looking for waterfalls, not monuments. Russell also mentioned several waterfalls on this creek. However, whenever someone says “waterfall” and does not mention any sort of height, I should know by now that the “waterfall” is not likely to be one of significance. Nonetheless, after studying my topo maps, I thought it was possible there might be a 20 footer on this creek, and thus I figured I must at least go check it out. I did not, in fact, find anything of significance. The biggest of the “waterfalls” was only about 5 feet, and you can see it in this photo, a tiny ant speck in the midst of the towering monuments. Even though it was raining quite hard, I had to take a photo of these incredible pinnacles. I continued from here further up the creek, but still found no waterfalls of any significance. Reluctantly, I retreated back down the canyon and headed up to North Fork Falls, just a few miles away.

It was my kind of weekend. Rain. And lots of it. The storm is not over yet as I write this, but so far it has been enough to get the waterfalls flowing pretty good. When the waterfalls are flowing, you know I am going to be out finding some.

My destination was Emigrant Gap. I knew it was going to be a wet morning hike, and it was. I was out hiking for about 3 hours, and I was pretty soaked by the end of it. I was looking for some new waterfalls out in the Emigrant Gap area. I did not find any new ones, but I know there are some and I know where they are, so I will definitely be returning in the future.

After my first hike, which was a strikeout, I went to North Fork Falls which I have been to before. What I would really like someday is to photograph this waterfall in the snow, but I think it is pretty much not possible to get to it when there is snow here. Nonetheless, there was snow on the ground here as I hiked down to the falls. Very wet snow. I was surprised to see it, but there was not any around the waterfall, unfortunately. At the North Fork campground, I scared up a heron, which was the only thing alive I saw all morning. No other wildlife. No humans. I don’t even recall seeing any birds. They were all taking cover from the rain. Only I and the heron were crazy enough to be outdoors on this dreary day.

The North Fork of the North Fork American River was flowing quite strong due to the rain. This is actually the biggest I have ever seen this waterfall. And this made the river crossing below the falls a bit tricky. Usually you can just rock hop across very easily. There was one big step over a deep section of the river that I needed to make. I tried to roll a big log across to make the crossing easy for me, but the log ended up floating downstream instead. Doh. Well, fortunately, I did not really need the log, and I was able to step across on the slick rocks without incident. On the other side of the river, you need to work your way up the slope and then down to a viewpoint of the falls. This part is very difficult and quite dangerous, especially on the very wet and slick rocks. But I came prepared. With rope. I almost always take rope on my hikes in case I need it, but up to now, I have never used it. I really wanted to get down this section to get to a better viewpoint, so I looped the rope around a tree, and used it to make my way down the slope. It worked. Once down, I had to figure out how to photograph the waterfall in the rain, which is always the hardest part of going waterfallin’ in the rain. I had my wife’s umbrella with me, and was careful not to drop it over the cliff into the river as I held it over my camera as I took my photographs. On the way back, I decided to stay on the same side of the river instead of crossing back. There is no trail, but it is not hard. In fact, I think it is actually a much easier way to get to the waterfall. I’m sure I will be using that same route next time I am here. In the snow.

First off, I must apologize to friend and fellow photographer Eric Leslie, who just posted his own photograph of this small waterfall on Brandy Creek, near Redding. I don’t mean to intrude on his fanfare, and I also really think his photo is much better than mine. You can see his photo here. I never bothered to process my photo from this location because at the time, I did not like it. However, after seeing his shot, I looked back in my archives and seeing as I had nothing else to post anyway, I decided to give it a go.

This was taken on the weekend after Thanksgiving of last year (2011). I came here with another photographer, Brian Rueb, and we were looking for a much larger waterfall on Brandy Creek. I am sure there are bigger waterfalls on this creek, but as of yet, I have not found any. We just came across this very small waterfall. It is a steep descent down to the creek at this spot, requiring a lot of scrambling around, and if I recall, poison oak as well. Brian did not even bother taking out his camera for this small waterfall, and I just took a quick shot myself, balancing myself on a rock in the middle of the creek. Afterwards, we went over to Crystal Creek Falls on the other side of Whiskeytown Lake. I think one of the main reasons I never bothered processing it was because I was disappointed in its size, hoping to find a much bigger waterfall than this. Now, a year later, I kinda like it. Go figure.