Waterfall Hunting

Last weekend twelve inches of snow fell in Fayetteville as spring formally arrived. Here in Hand Cove we had twenty-four hours of cold rain instead. By Monday morning the skies were bright blue, the day promised to be warm, and the run-off was continuously trickling down the hillsides to fill the cascading brooks. It was a perfect day for waterfall hunting.
Sue and I packed a lunch, put on hiking clothes, tossed my rescue gear into the car, and drove around the lake to the Leatherwood Wilderness Area in the Ozark National Forest.

Waterfall hunting is a rare adventure in the late winter and early spring. To get the best run-off and hence the best waterfalls, nature needs to be dormant with roots no longer sucking up moisture so eagerly. To get the best views, the old leaves should have fallen and the new leaves should not yet have fully emerged. It should be too cold for ticks and too early for poison ivy. It needs to have rained plentifully, but ideally the skies should be sunny. . . . Fortunately, all of those conditions were met on Monday morning.

I first discovered waterfall hunting a year or so before retiring by browsing through a book on the subject by Tim Ernst, the dean of Arkansas's hikers and nature photographers. Sue and I generally only visit the waterfalls in the Leatherwood Wilderness Area--and because it is a wilderness area, there are no formal trails. Some of the falls that are closest to the road have developed an informal path, but generally-speaking bushwacking is the name of the game. Since the great ice storm of 2009, that has become much more challenging.

Now there are huge tree trunks and large limbs everywhere, turning parts of the forest floor into a giant jungle gym. We visited only three waterfalls on Monday, and each of them was within a quarter mile (as the crow flies) of a gravel road. But two of the three were very challenging hikes. That quarter-mile hike always takes one down a steep hill to the top of the waterfall. Then it can be another quarter-mile--or farther--before one can make one's way to the base of the falls. Since a waterfall inevitably implies a rocky ledge, one usually has to consider some rock climbing . . . and there is always the remote risk of slipping, rolling, and tumbling off a cliff.

Waterfall hunting is an adventure that stokes a bit of adrenalin and rewards one with beautiful views . . . and aching muscles.