Tuesday, April 7
Today’s hike is with three good friends, not my meet up group. We are hiking the Olmsted Trail loop to Knickerbocker Falls. Our destination is off of the trail maps and we will be taking a seldom used “use trail” that is not on the map.
We start off on a closed asphalt road. It’s not very exciting but the weather is nice. It’s not too hot and it should be a good day.
About a mile in and we cut off the road onto a trail. The trail parallel road for about a mile and then rejoin it.
The road ends and transitions back to a single track trail for a bit.
The road and trail we were on took us to the site of the abandoned Auburn Dam project. This is another one of those failures of our state where huge sums of money were spent for the proposed Auburn dam. Homes were bought and constructed expecting to be on lake front property, The Forest Hill Bridge was built, and foundations for prepared For the dam, and then the project was scrapped. Here we are decades later in drought without adequate water storage for our state. We now stand overlooking the site of the proposed dam.
We once again we rejoined an access Road for a bit and then come to a hairpin turn with logs piled up at its Apex. This is where we leave the trail and bush whack our way to our destination.
We find ourselves on an old abandoned trail. There are some rocks lining it, and some of the bushes have been cut back. There is still an obvious foot path here.
We reached a small stream. Eric is joking that this is the fall as he’s been talking about it. I have been kidding about him. Spectacularly should be he giggles and says I’m gonna be let down. He points to this small stream and says this is it. I tell him one of the nice things about Hiking off Trail in the middle of nowhere his bodies can disappear. We chuckle and move along.
I have come across many beautiful flowers on the trail today
The trail again drops back down across a bit of a flat Mesa as we wind around a rock Hill . Soon we can hear the both from the river and the Falls
We come around the bend and we come to a good view of the falls. They are very beautiful and live up to my expectations. This is the lower fall there’s actually a middle and an upper as well. Eric Rocks
I poked around a little bit more and was able to pick my way to the pool at the bottom of the fall. This is absolutely gorgeous. God knew what he was doing with his creation.
After a little bit of snack, we load back up and start heading back uphill .
We stopped on the Mesa with incredible view over the river and more beautiful flowers. Eric brought his drone and I hope to attach some of his footage to the end of this blog.
On the way back, we again stopped at the site of the dam project and hiked to where they have prepared for one of the Side walls. It’s amazing when looking at the engineering they have done here. They have dug into the side of the mountain down to the bedrock and then laid a concrete foundation. You can see the same thing on the other side and how the damn would’ve arched into the river.
After hiking the road again for a while, we bumped back on a side trail that we have not been on on the way here. This will parallel the road and bring us back to the parking lot.
"Eric Rocks" - I approve of this message! :)
ReplyDeleteAnd I agree that we need to do this hike again soon so that I can fly the drone up into the canyon above the falls. I'm getting less worried about flying it out of direct sight.