This spring, take the plunge
With snowmelt and seasonal rains adding to the drama, it’s prime time for waterfall-watching
As fall is to leaf-peeping, spring is to waterfall-watching, a seasonal pursuit now underway in the northern and higher regions of the United States.
Waterfalls can range from thunderous plunges to delicate mossy trickles. They can be backcountry pop-ups or the centerpieces of parks, like Great Falls Park in McLean, Virginia, and Silver Falls State Park, near Salem, Oregon.
There’s no agreed-upon definition of a waterfall, according to Joel Scheingross, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Nevada, Reno, who studies those that detach from the bed of a river, creating an air pocket between the face and the water jet. Waterfalls, he explained, can be the result of glacial carving (as at Niagara Falls) or through faults in tectonic plates. Places where hard and soft rock mix often produce waterfalls pouring over a harder rock cap that carve away soft rock below.
“Any area where the water flow is dominated by snowmelt will get bigger waterfalls now, not just in the northern U.S., but at high elevations too,” Scheingross said. “If not snowmelt, you just need big storms.”
Especially now, perhaps, as pandemic-weary travelers continue to seek the safety and solace of the outdoors, waterfalls are, as Johnny Cheng, who writes about waterfalls on his website World of Waterfalls, puts it, “metaphors for how life carries on and nature goes about doing its thing.”
The following is a selective springtime guide to waterfalls around the United States.
New York
Roughly 6 million acres of the Adirondack Mountains offer waterfall-watching, from the well-known Rainbow Falls at Ausable Chasm, a tourist site since 1870, to the more secluded Gleasmans Falls near Lowville.
OK Slip Falls near Indian Lake lies between them on the spectrum, impressively high at around 250 feet — one of the tallest in the Adirondacks — reached via a roughly 3-mile trail through rolling woodlands that ends at a pair of overlooks (a short, very steep trail leads to the river below).
“What’s nice about OK Slip Falls is you travel a distance to get there, building anticipation,” said Stacy Pagoda, owner of Another Paradise Cove, a canoe and kayak rental shop in Long Lake, who offers regional sightseeing advice to visitors. “This year, we had a big snowmelt with quite a bit of rain, so the water everywhere is moving pretty good right now.”
Hamilton County, home to OK Slip Falls, has a waterfall challenge: identifying 19 waterfalls in the area reached via hikes that range from five minutes to several hours, each assigned a point value ranging from 1 (easy) to 4 (difficult, which is OK Slip’s rating).
New Hampshire
More than 10 waterfalls seasonally gush with high-country snowmelt and spring rain in and around Crawford Notch State Park in the White Mountains. The highest in the state, Arethusa Falls, drops over a nearly 200-foot cliff face.
Two of the park’s falls, the ribbonlike Silver Cascade and Flume Cascade, can be viewed from roadside stops. Others require a hike on trails that may be muddy or snowy this time of year.
“You can do a lot of hiking if you want to,” said Clare Arentzen, a senior outdoor guide with the Appalachian Mountain Club in New Hampshire, noting that the moderate 3-mile, round-trip trail to Arethusa Falls can be looped to the Bemis Brook Trail to reach the tiered Bemis Brook Falls for “more bang for your buck.”
Throughout the White Mountain region, Chris Whiton, a nature photographer who regularly shoots waterfalls, estimates that there are more than 100 named falls in shapes from flumes to drops to steps. He uses 19th-century guides published by railroads and hotels to find often unnamed waterfalls that have fallen off the map.
“Waterfalls are fun because they have such personality, and each is a little different,” he said.
Minnesota
The United States and Canada technically share 120-foot High Falls in Grand Portage State Park, where the Pigeon River forms the international border in northern Minnesota
on Ojibwe tribal lands.
“High Falls is the biggest of the plunges, the last big one the river takes before it lazily makes its way to Lake Superior, not quite 2 miles to the lake,” said Travis Novitsky, the park manager.
“It’s pretty common to get a rainbow when the water is high,” he added, noting the angle of the viewing platform to the falls, an effect also visible by moonlight.
In addition to seeing Minnesota’s highest falls, accessible by a paved trail, explorers can take a challenging 4.5-mile round-trip hike over rugged, rocky hills, crossing a ridge with panoramas of the river and Lake Superior, to reach more remote Middle Falls.
Grand Portage is on the north end of the 145-mile drive from Duluth along Lake Superior, stringing together eight state parks, most with their own waterfalls, including Tettegouche State Park, home to another High Falls, the second tallest in the state.
Washington
There are at least 150 waterfalls in Mount Rainier National Park, about 85 miles south of Seattle. But the unofficial count is much higher.
“There are times of year that if you counted every place where water is running and dropping, you probably have thousands in the park,” said Kevin Bacher, the park’s volunteer program manager. “There’s a good reason we’re in a region called the Cascades.”
It might take until July for the snow, which averages 53 feet annually in the 5,400-foot Paradise area, to melt. Snowmelt and water from 25 glaciers on the 14,410-foot namesake peak produce a prolonged torrent that starts in April and works its way to higher ground in summer.
“The park is best known for its mountains and grand scenic vistas, so a lot of times people miss the forest trails where you see the waterfalls,” Bacher said.
He recommended the lower-elevation Eastside Trail, introducing “a waterfall every quarter-mile or so” along the roughly 13-mile, one-way trail. The trail, which has several access points for shorter treks, follows the Chinook Creek and Ohanapecosh River through dense forests past a series of falls, including two-tiered-plunge Ohanapecosh Falls and “a bunch that aren’t named.”