I decided in early April to make the hike to the waterfall. Armed with my Fuji FinePix 2600 I set out to find the waterfall, take a few pictures, and make a cute web page to share the experience. It ended up taking two trips and cost me my camera, my one hundred forty dollar sunglasses (special gift to myself after LASIC surgery last year), a pair of pants, numerous bruises and a nasty case of poison ivy.

     The first trip I did by myself and it actually went well for the first part. I walked way too fast, took too few rest stops, and did not bring water (it was a spur of the moment thing) so I was out of breath most of the time. The was due to the fact that I did not know how far back the waterfall was so I was trying to make time.  I did finally find the waterfall and took what I thought would be some great pictures. Things started going bad here.

     After taking pictures of the waterfall I started heading back. I jumped up to the first rock which put me on my stomach aimed directly at the waterfalls pool. Out from my jacket pocket came my camera, GPS, car keys, etc. I made the mad dash to grab stuff as it was falling toward the pool. I managed to get everything but the camera. It had greater velocity as it was the first thing to pop out of my jacket. It bounced a few times on its ways down to the water. The first big bounce caused the batteries to fly out and go directly into the pool. It taunted me for a few seconds by floating and then promptly sank to the bottom (four feet). 

     I tried fishing the camera out with a tree branch but as soon as the branch touched the camera it sank into the moss. I then decided to remove my clothes (except shoes... and socks because I wanted to look like a complete idiot) and waded out for retrieval. This was the coldest water I have ever been in. I had no idea you lost control of numerous body functions in super cold water. When I reached down to feel for the camera uncontrollable sounds started coming from my mouth. I ran back to the shore a little freaked out. I gave up. Bye-bye Fuji FinePix camera.

     I was upset more at losing the pictures than the camera at the time. But I was so tired  and thirsty all I could think about was getting back to my truck and getting some water. When I made it down to the final climb it hit me... I left my glasses on the rock when I waded into the water!! I would not have taken a million dollars to go back at that point. Bye-bye glasses.

      That was Tuesday. I decided to go on a retrieval mission for my sun glasses on Friday. I bought a new camera (an Olympus 300 Stylus, the only weather proof digital camera I could find) and informed my son I would be needing his company Friday afternoon. I am happy to say there was not a major equipment loss during the second trip. It was not exactly a smooth operation as you will find out if you continue to read this commentary but there are now pictures to share!

     Unfortunately it is harder to climb DOWN than up and there is no other easy way out of the back canyon. Tyler did fall on our way back. fortunately it was at the part where there was a landing spot a few feet below. When he fell I instinctively reached out to catch him. One arm reached him in time but I didn't even slow him down. My wrist was bent straight back and immediately swelled up in pain. Tyler only reported being hurt where his back impacted my wrist (he hit no rocks). Go figure.

     These are pictures Tyler and I took heading up to rescue the sun glasses. This is a very pretty area. While these pictures mostly show the creek there is a beautiful canyon surrounding it also. 

     Those who decide to go up to the second waterfall will end up crossing the creek a minimum of a dozen times. None of these are difficult crossings though I will bet nobody makes it all the way to the waterfall and back without getting into the creek at least once. Except for occasional pools the creak rarely gets over a foot deep. The deepest I saw anywhere was about 5 feet.

     You will need to go through numerous vegetation on the trail (no avoiding it) These pictures were shot during the second week of April so I thought I was safe but somewhere on this hike I picked up some poison ivy. I know what poison ivy looks like and did not see any on the first trip. I was unaware that you can still get the oil on you skin even when there are no leaves. Live and learn. As I write this both of my arms, my upper back, my neck, and forehead are all seeping gross goo.  Tyler ended up with it on his arms but as it is his first exposure (my third, it gets worse every time you are exposed) he did not get it nearly as bad.

     This is a little area about fifteen minutes from the second waterfall. Three small falls are visible here. Each of these are about five feet high (seven feet for the first one) and they empty into a center "ditch" about three-four feet deep. Its hard not to notice that there seems to be natural walkways in the rocks to get you across the river almost everywhere. Numerous places have only one way to get across but nowhere was it impossible. I kept thinking "wow, lucky that ten ton boulder is there" or "Amazing it formed this way so I can get across".

     To give an idea of the length of the entire walk, the first picture of Tyler climbing devils ladder was taken at 2:48pm. The last picture was the large waterfall at the beginning of the canyon seen up above (taken after we returned). It was taken at 6:53pm. We took plenty of short rest stops this time so as to not get too tired. That is roughly fours hours there and back.

     I almost gave up the first trip when I came to these falls thinking these were the falls the local people were talking about. I had previously found a picture of a cascade that was supposed to be from Jump Creek canyon (one of the few pictures I was able to find of the back canyon on the web). Since I had not run across it yet I decided to go on for fifteen more minutes before turning around and luckily soon came across the cascade!

     It is possible to run up the right side but more difficult to get down on your way back. Both Tyler and I nearly turned this into a slippery slide coming down. The rocks at this point all become very hard to get a grip on when they are wet. Unfortunately we were both very wet on our way back.  The rock went from having decent grip to feeling like Teflon.

     I tried to get GPS locations for all of these features but the canyon walls were just two high. The few times I tried I was only able to get two satellites solid.

      This is as far as I have gone in the Jump Creek canyon. There are four separate drops to this fall.  I was not able to get all four drops into one picture. The picture below shows three of them (twenty feet, seven feet, and three feet). The second drop (four feet) is shown in the picture to the left. If anyone has gone farther than this and knows if there are any more falls I would really like to know. I am planning on going one more time this year to see what is further upstream from here.

     As Tyler and I approached the falls I could see my glasses were no longer sitting on the big rock near the bottom pool. I half expected this but I had not seen a single human being other than Tyler on either trip so I was still holding out hope. There was a large wind storm going when I was leaving from the Tuesday trip so I was not even sure they could have remained on the rock anyway.

     I resigned myself to getting a few pictures and being happy with at least that. I am particularly pleased with the picture on the direct left. It is such a shame to crop it down and remove all that detail for the web. By the way all of these pictures were done using the "low" (3) setting on Photoshop to create the jpegs.

     I was able to make it to the top of these falls to get a some pictures. For some reason it was extremely easy this time whereas last time I couldn't scale the same place to save my life. There are some very interesting pictures of the canyon from the waterfalls brink. I was also able to take a look farther upstream and it looks like there could be more interesting sites.  I also took some pictures of Tyler who was down at the bottom of the falls and hey!!! He is wearing my glasses! He saw them in the water while I was climbing and fished them out! Unfortunately it turned out that the water partially ruined the film on the lenses. Wearable but now relegated to a backup pair. Boo!!

    See that picture with me by the waterfall celebrating my newly found glasses? The happiness was short lived. About three seconds after the picture was taken I went down that little moss slide into the water and completely soaked my pants. Tyler laughed but within the next three minutes he fell in the next pool down and was soaked to his knees. I also fell (again) into that pool getting out. As if this wasn't bad enough... as we climbed over some of the larger rocks my wet soaked pants started splitting down the front. It started at the end of my zipper and would split about an inch with every major stretch over a rock. By the time we reached devils ladder they had spilt well over 18 inches fully exposing the skin from below the right knee up to my zipper. I also ended up with two nasty insect bites on that knee.

     Below are two of the photos I took from the brink of the falls shown above. I was trying to give a sense as to the size of the canyon walls. If you look at the pictures closely you can see a formation that somewhat resembles a face (cropped out to the right). There are several interesting features like this throughout the canyon and I wish I had paid attention to this and taken more pictures of the canyon walls and surrounding area as we passed though.

     To my knowledge this waterfall has no name. If someone out there knows if there is a name for this waterfall or if the local people in the area have given it a name please let me know. I'm going to refer to this fall as Rock Face Falls until someone tells me different :)

     The rock Tyler is standing in the photos below is also the very rock where my Fuji 2600 FinePix camera took the plunge. The reason Tyler is standing there is because he is showing me that he had just found my sun glasses. They were not on the rock where I had placed them but had fallen into the water. Tyler was looking for the camera when he spotted the sun glasses. In the high resolution view of the picture on the right the Fuji camera can actually be seen in the water (we were unable to fish it out, the moss enveloped again as soon as we tried).