Zim Zim Falls, part 1 - Getting There

Saturday we made a day out of visiting Zim Zim Falls. It's a fairly tall waterfalls in a fairly remote corner of the Bay Area. It's technically in Napa County, but not the part you think of when you think "Napa Valley". It's out in the wilderness.

We set our alarms early for Saturday morning, thinking optimistically that we might actually get up at 6:30am. We hit the snooze button several times and got up closer to 7:30. Then we puttered around the house for more than an hour, continuing to wake ourselves up before packing for the trip. We left the house a bit after 9am, but that was okay.... With the long days this time of year we knew we'd have plenty of time, even with the round-trip drive being 5 hours.

We even had time for brunch along the way. We stopped at the Cordelia junction where I-680 ends and merges into I-80 and grabbed a fast-food quickie at Del Taco. Remember, eating at Del Taco is one of our guilty pleasures. We only get to do it on road trips, though. This one 73 miles away is practically the closest one to us!

The brunch stop was good because it split the drive roughly in half, time-wise. It also marked the shift from hammering along interstate highways at 70-80 mph to cruising winding country roads at 35-50.

The last bit— well, the next-to-last bit— of the drive to Zim Zim winds around the shore of Lake Berryessa. It's always a beautiful sight in the mornings not just because of the lake, which is beautiful, but because along the road are several nesting platforms for ospreys built by conservationists. And the ospreys have obliged by building nests in them. As we passed by this morning we saw an osprey in or near almost every one of them, their large, white heads and brown-and-white bodies poking up from their massive stick nests. Plus we saw a few of these birds on the wing.

The actual last part of the drive to the trail is where the adventure begins. The road up into the mountains from Lake Berryessa narrows and becomes rough. As it climbs higher it passes several water crossings. Here's a short video I made:

Watch on YouTube

When we visited last year there was water in all the crossings. And it was deep enough that people who tried fording carelessly in ordinary passenger cars had trouble. I got through just fine in my sports car. That was in March 2023, so it was earlier in the season, and it was after a winter of record rainfall. Thus it was only slightly surprising that this year most of water crossings were dry. Only the last crossing had water, and it was maybe 2 inches deep.

Really the biggest "offroading" challenge this year was all the potholes in the road. I had to steer carefully around them to avoid bursting a sports-car tire. It wasn't so bad last year. The condition of the road clearly has deteriorated. I don't know how much longer it'll be before the county does repairs. Maybe next time we do this drive we'll take our 4x4 SUV— just to get past the potholes!

Hiking Zim Zim Falls: 9 Water Crossings - Each Way!

Yesterday we hiked Zim Zim Falls in a remote part of Napa County. As I noted in my previous blog, just getting there seemed like half the adventure. But then you get out on foot on the trail and realize the adventure has just begun. There are nine water crossings on the way to Zim Zim Falls. Oh, and a climb up a mountain. I put together a video blog about it:

Watch on YouTube

This is a trail we also hiked last year, in March (2023). A couple things were different this time. For one, I chose to wear hiking sandals instead of hiking boots. And I chose to leave them on through all the water crossings. I did that based on something I figured out in real time on last year's hike: walking in soggy shoes actually isn't that bad, especially compared to the time sink of changing out of and back into footwear. Eighteen times.

Another difference was that the trail is getting overgrown. Last year it was a clear dirt road (fire road / utility right-of-way) the whole way. This year it's all overgrown with grass up to waist high. In many places it's just a single track through the tall grass, a single track that's been tramped down by other hikers.

At first the overgrowth bothered me. It's a sign of lack of maintenance, and I was worried about ticks. But we didn't find any ticks on ourselves (we checked), and after a while we found that the overgrowth helped us feel like we were out in a part of the wilderness rarely visited by other people. We only saw, like, 4 other small groups of hikers in 4 hours anyway. The near solitude was enjoyable.