Exploring Step Falls

Maine Week Travelog #27
Step Falls Preserve, ME - Sunday, 20 Jun 2021, 11am.

Our week-long adventure in Maine is close to over... according to the calendar. We leave tomorrow. But when we look at our list of things to do... well, we're still in the thick of it. We're aiming to hike several trails and visit numerous waterfalls today. ...Assuming the weather holds out, unlike yesterday when it rained.

We got rolling from the hotel around 9am after enjoying breakfast of leftovers on the common deck outside our small room. 9 was later than I wanted, but fortunately many of the hikes were clustered and not too far away. Our first destination, Step Falls Preserve, was a simple, 20 minute drive.

We pulled into the small trailhead parking lot and rejoiced that ours was the only car there. We'd enjoy solitude of having the park to ourselves! But then another car pulled in and three hikers jumped out and practically ran to the trail ahead of us. Well, at least they were a) quiet and b) kind of disappeared ahead of us.



The hike to step falls is a walk through the woods to a spot where water tumbles over a long, gentle slope of exposed granite. During the melt season this must be quite a sight though right now, in the almost-summer, it's fairly sedate. We took advantage of the low water levels by climbing around on the rocks, exploring many of the tiers of the falls.



Step Falls Preserve is a small park, owned by the Mahoosuc Land Trust. There's but a single trail and it's barely 1/2 mile long. While it's short on length it's long on views.



We spent over an hour in the park. Exploring all the little steps of Step Falls was fun. Having it virtually to ourselves was awesome. And the morning sun felt good— though I realized after of an hour of it I'd forgotten to apply suntan lotion. We'll see how I feel tonight.

On our walk back to the car we passed a few more small groups of hikers coming in and saw several cars at the trailhead. We got in— and out— just in time to enjoy the solitude.

Screw Auger Falls

Maine Week Travelog #28
Grafton Notch State Park, ME - Sunday, 20 Jun 2021, 11:40am.

"Screw Auger Falls". That sounds like a condemnation, not a place name. But it's actually a nice little waterfalls in Grafton Notch State Park in western Maine.

Screw Auger Falls in Grafton Notch State Park, Maine

The name, I presume, comes from a screw auger, a type of drill, which it looks like might have been used to carve narrow gorges through the hard granite bedrock. Actually that work was done by nature some 12,000 years ago. A melting glacier just north of this notch sent huge amounts of water down the river, water rich with sand, gravel, and small rocks. The swift water and high sediment acted like a water drill to carve out the narrow canyon— er, notch, as they're fond of calling canyons in this part of the country.

We weren't even planning on hiking this falls today but instead saving it for tomorrow. It's a short trek close to hotel we could do before heading down to the airport. On the other hand, it's a short trek and it's right here— literally on the way from our previous hike, Step Falls, to the one we plan to do next, Dunn Falls. So why not stop?

From the parking lot it's barely even a walk to the start of the action. We walked out across the broad granite flats above the falls then across a bridge to the far side. From that side were perches right on the lip of the canyon from which you could see down into it. Alas the view of the falls from there was poor.

Next we climbed down steep rocks on the far side of the canyon to the river below the falls. There was no official trail there but a few obvious use paths, now called "social trails" in the 21st century, showed where people before us had gone. At the bottom of the canyon there was no view back up into it, so we crossed the river again— this time picking a narrow spot and hopping across on rocks— and searched for a steep path up again.

The easiest route up was a steep gully that led off to the side, bringing us up to the road alongside the park. The distances were all close so we followed the road for a bit then cut back through the trees once the ground was fairly level.

Back at the lip of the gorge I found a rocky perch from which there was a great photo spot. Hawk and I took turns taking pictures there then walked back along the marked trail to the parking lot.

Hiking Probably-Not-Dunn Falls

Maine Week Travelog #29
Dunn Notch, ME - Sunday, 20 Jun 2021, 2:30pm.

So far this trip the Maine waterfalls book we've been using the past few days has not led us astray. The descriptions have been accurate, the pictures have been helpful for choosing pretty sights, and perhaps most importantly the driving directions to some of these remote trailheads have been correct— even if we doubted them at times when Google Maps suggested alternate, unpaved routes. This trek, to Dunn Falls, left us frustrated with the book. The trail description was off, like the author forgot a section of the trail when transcribing her trail notes to manuscript. We're pretty sure we didn't find Dunn Falls, at least not the one pictured in the book... though we did see several other falls that made this a still totally worthwhile hike.

The trail started where the Appalachian Trail crossed a country road miles from any town. It's marked on maps as the Dunn Trailhead. We quickly forked off the AT onto a side trail marked "Cascade Trail", knowing we'd rejoin the AT later on to loop back to the road on it.



The Cascade Trail is aptly named. It follows a fork of Ellis Creek downstream past numerous small cascades. It was a beautiful trail through a riparian habitat, with only the chattering of the brook and birds breaking the silence. Plus, it was all downhill— easy, right? Well, what one goes down one must come back up. At least if one wants to get back home eventually.

Near where the side creek flowed into the main stream the trail climbed steeply over a ridge. This was one of the least fun parts of the trek. Why go so high up from the water just to have to drop back down to it? Alas, this would not be the last time this hike we climbed step rises just to go back down again.

Past the confluence of creeks a spur trail promised to take us to Dunn Falls. "This is the only way to see the main part of Dunn Falls," the book advised us. Except after a short distance the spur trail along the creek disappeared. Likely heavy flows in the creek had washed rocks, branches, and logs across the path badly enough that it was no longer passable, except to the very spry and very determined. We were not quite enough of either so we returned to the main trail.



The main trail climbed, climbed, climbed. We felt like we were repaying all that easy downhill hiking we started with. Then a small view opened up to a falls below us. If the book is accurate this is the less awesome upper part of Dunn Falls. But we're not sure the book is accurate about that.

The reason we doubt its accuracy is that it tells us to rejoin the Appalachian Trail just above this and return home. Sure enough there's a junction with the AT not far beyond this... but shortly after that there's a sign along the AT for a spur trail marked "Falls". More waterfalls? Sure, sign us up!



Another short spur trail led us to a small waterfalls that dropped into a broad, shallow pool. Maybe this was Dunn Falls? According to maps maybe it is, according to the book it's not. Who knows. But it was definitely peaceful. And through the notch in the rock we could see what looked like a taller falls behind it. We saw a very crude trail up a steep slope far to the right and up we went.



We were well rewarded for our trail-finding (the route had clearly suffered a slide as skilled enough hikers we picked a route through it) by enjoying an up-close view of a fair tall waterfalls. Was this Dunn Falls? Maybe. A rose by any other name....

From here we picked our way back down to the Appalachian Trail and then followed it back to the car. Easy, right? Well, easy in concept, but this segment of the AT had 3 steep climbs followed immediately by steep drops. That's kind of a thing that happens in places with trails like the AT. The people who routed it and built it did so to get from some Point A to Point B they selected, even when that means going straight up one side of a ridge and down the other. That's particularly true of parts of the trail constructed in the 1910s and 20s. Parts built or rebuilt in the 1930s, under the aegis of the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and the WPA (Works Progress Act) more often tend to contour nicely around hills instead of going hard up and down them. Credit the enormous public investment in infrastructure of the WPA and the hard work of the thousands of young people employed the CCC during the Great Depression to build these things we of their great-grandchildren's generation still enjoy.