Wallace Falls State Park

Seth agreed to accompany me on what is, for me at least, a significant hike. Without him along to navigate the trail, juggle my equipment, and keep me company, it would not have been nearly as successful or as much fun.

Not far from the small town of Gold Bar, about 40 minutes east of Snohomish is the parking lot and starting point for the trail to see a total of three sets of falls along the Wallace River. We made it the 2 miles one-way to the middle falls and back. That does sound so bad until you realize that it also covers almost 1000 feet vertically. I'm going to pretty sore tomorrow.



Near the beginning of the trail, there are several smaller streams that come to join the Wallace River on its way downhill to join the Skykomish at Gold Bar. There are interesting places to see the water as it does the dance of finding the most direct path down hill.

Even the smallest details make for interesting compositions.

There are a few places early on where you can get near the main river for a view of the rushing water amongst the quieter pools.

Being the PNW, the forest is filled with ferns and moss. On this tree, the fern grow out of the moss.

On a small wooden bridge that crosses the river (or, perhaps a tributary, it is hard to tell), we can get an overhead view of the water. as it rushes and foams.

The forest in many places is open and clear of anything except trees and ferns.

There are three sets of falls on the river that you can access by the trail. The first, the lower falls, is not too big or small. While I could have benefitted from a longer focal length lens, it is nice to see how it spreads across the rock face. The yellow flowers provide a nice accent to the closer river stones.

But zooming out also provides a bit of perspective. Here, you can see the lower and middle falls, one behind the other.

In the panorama below, you can see that the middle falls is a sequence of smaller drops.

The shorter shutter speeds in the images above and below bring some motion to the scene and give a feeling for the motion of the water.

At the peak of journey, we got our view of the middle falls. This images just seems to work better in B&W. The river makes a better contrast with the grey and black trees than with world of green that surrounded it.

There was another half mile or more left to go to the very top, but our legs and the time available were running out on us so we headed back to the parking lot. Elapsed time, parking lot to parking lot was about five and a half hours.

As I said above, going to be sore tomorrow. Glad I planned this the day before I have a massage scheduled!