Wallace Falls
Springtime is waterfall season in the Pacific Northwest, as the snow starts to melt in the mountains and the rivers start to swell. It’s a great time to get out in the lowlands looking for waterfalls, both because they are usually at their best this time of year, but also because the high country is still snowbound for another few months. There are a bunch of great waterfall hikes close to where I live, and a few weeks back I decided to revisit Wallace Falls State Park, an old favorite.
Wallace Falls has a reputation for two things: a relatively easy hike to some picturesque waterfalls, and crowds. If you visit here on a sunny summer weekend, you might have to wait on the access road for parking for hours (or be turned away outright). If you manage to find a place to park, you’ll often find crowded trails, especially to the lower waterfall. Enough people visit in the summer that the park has had to install signs every so often with instructions on how to call for help, since with the increased numbers of visitors come an increased number of search-and-rescue callouts. In short, it’s not a very peaceful place on a sunny summer weekend.
However, if you visit in the off season, particularly on a day that isn’t bulletproof weather, you’ll find that it’s a very quiet and tranquil place, with the river and waterfalls surrounded by some beautiful forest. Before you get to that though, the trail starts under some high voltage power lines. Normally I find this kind of thing a bit of a distraction, but the clearcut around them does afford a nice view of the surrounding peaks before you enter the forest. That, and they make for some interesting scenes either by themselves, or set against the surrounding peaks.
After you pass this section though, it’s all forest, all the way to the falls. You are immediately presented with a choice of trail. Take the Railroad Grade trail for a gentle (but longer) walk along a service road up to a junction that takes you to the falls. Or, take the Woody trail for a more traditional hiking experience, along and over the river and through the woods (grandma’s house not included). I usually take the Woody trail up, and the Railroad Grade trail down, which is exactly what I did on this visit.
Although it heads into the woods, the Woody trail is not so named because of that. Instead, it’s named after a senator who helped build the trail. Adding to the naming confusion, there’s a sign right when you enter the woods with a line from a poem by “W. Woodsworth”, which I’m sure many visitors assume is “Woody Woodsworth”, but it’s actually William. Even the name of the park and the falls is a result of confusion around the last name of some of the first settlers in the area (“Kwayaylsh” which sounds a little like “Wallace”).
After a mile or maybe a little longer, the trail arrives at the lower falls, which has a large picnic shelter alongside a view of the falls. Many people turn around here, but I actually think this is the least impressive of the three main falls. Continuing up the trail a little ways takes you to one of the more interesting finds on the trail. The tree in the image below has a trunk about 20 feet high, and out of that trunk are two more trees growing. It makes for a really interesting scene I think, in an already beautiful forest.
A little while after leaving the picnic shelter on the lower falls, you’ll arrive at the middle falls, and eventually the upper falls. I think the middle falls is the most photogenic, but all three falls are quite beautiful.
Usually for waterfalls, I pack a tripod, but on this day I was being lazy and decided to put the R5’s image stabilizer to the test for some long exposures. I managed to get some nice images with just the image stabilizer on the R5 + the RF 70-200/2.8L, and bracing myself against a tree. I’m also a bit of a non-traditionalist when it comes to waterfalls, and really like shooting short exposures with fast shutter speeds in the 1/4000th range or so, so I grabbed a few of those too.
From the upper falls, more adventures await. A trail leads to an old road which leads to a couple of backcountry lakes, seldom visited by most park visitors. These lakes used to require cross-country navigation skills, but the park service has recently installed some reflectors on the trees to help try to reduce the number of lost visitors. I was running out of time on the day of my visit, so I skipped the lakes, but I definitely suggest them if you visit and want to get away from the hustle and bustle of the main set of trails.
From the upper falls, it’s an hour or so walk back to the trail junction where you can pick up the Railroad Grade trail back to the trailhead. By the time I was heading down, the hordes were heading up, so it took longer than expected. But once I took the cutoff for the Railroad Grade, I saw absolutely nobody until I hit the intersection with the Woody trail. Miles of peace and quiet in the woods is a wonderful thing!