Fall Creek Falls (North Umpqua) 1-23-18

[bobcat]

I stayed with friends who live near this short National Recreation Trail, so stopped to hike it on the way out. Fall Creek rushes down a mossy forested valley filled with a jumble of massive boulders. Near the beginning of the trail, there’s a narrow defile, about as wide as one human, that you have to wind through. Old-growth Douglas-firs are scattered about. I took the diversion to Job’s Garden, where you can see a collapsing basalt wall undergoing a millennial process of folding (This is 30 million-year-old Old Cascades basalt, not the younger than a million years rock of the High Cascades).

Then it was on to the lower (and highest) tier of Fall Creek Falls, which plunges prettily over a mossy face. The sign at the trailhead talks of two tiers, other sources say four, but I counted three. The path switchbacks up to a head-on view of the middle tier where it spouts out of a narrow cleft. Then I hiked up to FR 4710, the original North Umpqua Highway before Highway 138 was built. I walked left over the road bridge, and dropped down to a mossy promontory to get a face-on view of the upper tier, which spills prettily over a 10-foot drop, all three tiers totaling about 100 feet.

Earlier in the day, we had wandered about driving on forest roads and crossed Fall Creek higher up, passing below Ramsay Falls, a taller cascade that is not readily visible in the summer when everything is leafed out.

[justpeachy]

Pretty! There are some lovely spots down that way, but it's a bit too far for a two-day weekend so I haven't been there in awhile.