This is my video for incredible West Cherry Creek Falls, in the Emigrant Wilderness, Stanislaus National Forest, California Waterfalls. A 3 day backpacking adventure, with my son Jadon. The West Cherry Creek Canyon ranks right up near to top of the most beautiful places I have ever seen in my life. Two spectacular waterfalls, towering granite cliffs, magnificent river. The beauty was stunning, and I fell in love with this canyon. I’m not so sure Jadon felt the same.
This is 40 ft. high Merced Peak Falls in Yosemite. It is quite lovely and fairly easy to get up close to it.
Now that it is summer and the mosquitoes have arrived, I am done with hiking. Or am I? I do not usually hike much in the summer because of the heat and the mosquitoes, both of which I hate absolutely. With the low snow pack this year, the waterfalls are not going to be flowing throughout the summer either (unlike the last two years), so what is the point in torturing myself? I don’t know, I am sure I will go on a hike or two, but I will not be backpacking again until September.
I thought I did really well this year with my backpacking trips. Much better than last year. I went on six backpacking trips this winter/spring, and five of them were successful (in terms of seeing waterfalls). That is definitely a huge accomplishment.
So see you all in the Fall. But seriously, I still have tons of photos to process from my last 3 trips. So even if I am not hiking much, you still have those to look forward to. Ha ha.
This is my recent 2 day solo backpacking trip to Lake Lois, Desolation Wilderness, Eldorado National Forest, California, near Wrights Lake / Lake Tahoe. It was Memorial Day weekend. There was still 5 feet of snow at Lake Lois, it was fantastic, and I found a couple beautiful waterfalls as well. Desolation Wilderness is one of my favorite areas to hike and backpack.
(Philippians 1:21)
I mentioned that I saw a number of waterfalls on the Merced River. Some of these are marked waterfalls. At least one of those marked waterfalls is not even 20 ft. high, and should not even be called a waterfall. There are others, however, that are not marked, and some of those are well over 20 ft. high. Nothing huge, but definitely waterfall worthy. Why are they not considered waterfalls by the National Park Service? Some of these unmarked falls are out of reach, some were not very photogenic, and some were in horrible harsh light so I did not take any photos. This one, though, I thought was a really good one, and I was able to get to it in the morning when the light was still good. It is about 30 ft. high, and is a powerful little thing. It was so misty at the base of the falls that it was practically impossible to take photos. Nonetheless, I did take a photo of it.
After photographing the falls, I ate my breakfast here. I did not doddle. I had a long hike ahead of me. It was going to be a 21+ mile hike back to the Happy Isles trailhead. It would be a very long day. I was going to die.
I am not positive but I do not think I’ve ever hiked 21 miles in a day before (though I’ve come close). I was certain, though, that I could hike that distance today because it was all downhill. No problem. It was not quite “all” downhill, however. There was one uphill section that I knew about beforehand and I was mentally prepared for it – about 100 ft. in elevation gain after passing through Echo Valley. However, there were a number of other “little” up hills that I definitely did not remember seeing on the way up. These ones killed me. I was not ready for them. They should not be there. It is supposed to be all downhill hiking. The two worst sections were just before the top of Nevada Falls, and then right at the end of the hike below Vernal Falls. I almost died. Literally.
I thought I made very good time to the top of Nevada Falls. After this point, the hike is excruciatingly slow going. There are two reasons: One, there are hundreds of people on the trail. There are many narrow spots where you must go in single file, so you need to wait for the people coming up the trail before you can proceed. Also, it is not always easy to pass slow people going down. You need to wait for a wide enough place, or hope they step aside so you can pass them. I always try to descend from Nevada Falls as fast as I can, even though I am very tired by this point. This brings us to the second reason: the terrain is very steep, rocky, and with many awful steps cut into the rock. It is awfully slow going down. It just takes a very long time.
I finally got back to the car beat tired. It was 3PM. Not too bad, overall, for a 21 mile hike. I started at 5:30AM. It took more than one full hour to exit Yosemite Valley. The traffic was totally ridiculous. They did something to the roads in the Valley, re-routing or re-arranging them. I swear they made things 1000 times worse than they were before. What genius decided this? It has never been so slow driving around Yosemite Valley. Even last year, though it was horribly busy, it was not as bad as this year. It is just so stupid now. It does not make me want to ever go back to Yosemite (but of course, I will).
I finally got to Groveland and stopped at Pizza Factory as I always do after my Yosemite hikes. I was absolutely starving. Bless the Lord, they were not busy. I ate my fill of pizza and garlic bread, and then made the long drive back home. I may have almost died on the long hike back, but it was worth everything. It was a great few days in the Yosemite Wilderness.
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I got up very early in the dark because I wanted to get to a couple waterfalls up the trail on the Merced River before the sun. That is about 4.5 miles in a couple hours. I made it but I screwed up on the first one. I had set my ISO very high and forgot to turn it back. Ugh. I do hope that picture still turns out ok. The second falls was only 12 ft. high, so that was a bit disappointing. I would not even call it a waterfall, but the park service calls it a waterfall. I found some other waterfalls on the Merced River that were much bigger and yet the NPS does not recognize them. More on that later.
After that initial rush, I could finally relax. I ate my breakfast at the second falls, and tended to the blisters on my foot. I stayed an hour at the small 12 foot waterfall, watching the birds play in the river.
From here I only had four more miles to hike on this day. I arrived at my campsite by 10AM. All I can say is WOW. At its source, the Merced River has three main forks that come together. All three have waterfalls. The biggest fork is the Triple Peak Fork and this has the biggest waterfall. It is a monster waterfall. It is almost 600 feet high (my calculation is 585 ft. high). That makes it just oh so slightly smaller than Nevada Falls (officially 594 ft.), and thus easily the second biggest waterfall on the Merced River. Unofficially, I believe the NPS measurement of Nevada Falls is incorrect, and that would mean Triple Peak is actually the biggest waterfall on the Merced. Anyhow, Triple Peak was flowing magnificently. It was absolutely stunning. I had only seen one photo of it before and that was at low flow. At high flow, it is incredible.
It is also very difficult to photograph. Although you can see the entire waterfall, it is blocked by many trees, and is not photograph-able from any single viewpoint. That means I had to photograph it in sections. This was difficult because it is in the sun for most of the day, so I could not even get to all the sections before it got dark, but I got to the main ones anyway.
Now to find a campsite. I wanted to camp as close to the waterfall as possible. There was one big problem today: mosquitoes. There was not much of a breeze. It came and went. When the breeze stopped, the mosquitoes would come attack me immediately. When the breeze started again, I had a bit of relief. There were more mosquitoes closer to the falls so I tried to pick a spot further back that was more open and had a bit more breeze. The only trouble was that the ground was uneven. I would have a lumpy sleep tonight. Was it worth it? In my opinion, anything is worth enduring if it means less mosquitoes.
It was still early in the day. What would I do all day? I decided to climb to the top of the falls (500 ft. climb up the mountain) to see what it was like, and to see how long it would take. The top of the falls is about a 80 ft. drop, and it was spectacular, well worth photographing from up there. So … that meant I would have to go back down to camp, then climb back up to the top a SECOND time, later that evening. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment. Some people might say that, but to me it was worth the effort. So I went back down the mountain to my campsite, lounged about all afternoon, waiting for evening to come.
Finally it came. Yet I was still too early. I had to wait an hour at the top of the falls for the sun to go down behind the mountains. It was also far more misty at the top than it was at noon. The flow in the waterfall was noticeably much stronger due to snow melt from the day. My calculations were also off. I calculated that the falls would be in shade by 7:30PM. That would give me “just” enough time to go down, photograph the middle tier, and then retreat back to camp before dark. It was 7:40PM and the top of the falls was still in the sun. I could not wait any longer. I had to photograph it now. After doing this, I ran down the mountain (which was difficult because it was very rocky), made it over to the middle tier (shown here), then ran back to camp. I got back just in time, got ready for bed quickly, and went to sleep. It may have been a lumpy sleep, but I slept.