Seeking waterfalls along the North Umpqua River

A couple of weekends ago after work, hubby and I loaded our little teardrop trailer and headed out on a weekend trip to photograph waterfalls along the North Umpqua River Scenic Byway.

Saturday morning we awoke to drizzle, but that didn’t stop us. The rain didn’t stick around and we enjoyed nearly a full day of no rain. It was just the right amount of overcast skies that made it the perfect conditions for photographing waterfalls. The sun peaked out in the late afternoon and we enjoyed the warm afternoon sunshine.

The first waterfall we visited was Fall Creek Falls. On the trail to the falls Mike and I saw some wet paw prints coming out of the water onto the trail in front of us. The prints were pretty fresh and still quite wet. Walking the trail to the falls, the prints were on the trail before us. They finally trailed off to the right and then disappeared. It looked as though an animal just went back into the brush. Later, after photographing the falls, Mike found the spot by the creek where the animal was probably resting across the creek. There were paw prints everywhere. We couldn’t say for sure what it was but we joked that it was probably a cougar. Whatever it was, I’m glad we didn’t run into it on the trail!

We also visited Tokatee Falls, Whitehorse Falls and Watson Falls. All of these we visited last March with Steven Michael when there was still snow on the ground.

Though we didn’t find much in the way of fall colors, we had a fun day. The water was very low on most of the falls so they weren’t too impressive. My favorite was Whitehorse Falls. We are planning to visit more waterfalls within the Umpqua National Forest later this month.

Mike did a little video on his iPhone of our excursion.