Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Today we took advantage of spring weather getting a bit warmer and journeyed out to Zim Zim Falls. It's a surprisingly tall waterfalls, over 100' tall, in remote Napa County on the edge of the Bay Area. And I say again because we've turned it into an annual right of spring passage. We hiked Zim Zim last year in late May and in late March 2023. One of the standout things about the hike to Zim Zim is that in addition to seeing a tall falls, the hike to/from it involves 9 water crossings each way. ...And that's just the hike! The drive to the trailhead involves a few water crossings, too, though today only one had water in it.

I'll post photos and video this coming week when I have time to work on them.

Georgia Travelog #21
Vogel State Park - Saturday, 12 Apr 2025, 5:30pm

It's getting late. It's 5:30pm already, an hour at which I've become accustomed to thinking, "Welp, that's the last of the useful light for the day." But that's the great thing about the post-Daylight Saving Time spring.... Sunset isn't 'til just after 8pm today! And use the saved daylight we will. We've just finished our fourth outdoors activity today, and we've still got one more short hike to go.

The one we've just finished is Trahlyta Falls in Vogel State Park.



There's a trail from the park's lake (above the falls) down to that viewing platform near the bottom. The park's kind of a mess right now with construction, though, and we realized we could save ourselves some huffing and puffing, too, by checking out the falls from here— from a roadside pull-out on US 19. That's right: this "hike" was a matter of simply stopping the car on the side of the highway, hopping out, and walking about 20 meters back to find the best vantage point.

In beauty I walk... even when all I do is hop out of the car. 😂

Georgia Travelog #18
Helen - Saturday, 12 Apr 2025, 12pm

Another day, another string of waterfall treks here in the Appalachian Mountains of north Georgia. Today I hope will work out better, weather-wise, than yesterday. The forecast shows sun all day.

Our first hike today was Anna Ruby Falls. It's in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest, though to get to it we had to drive through Unicoi State Park. Fortunately there's no fee collected by the state for us passers-through. There's just a fee for collected by the US government. I know, *grumble* *grumble*, why's there a fee. Just pay it and be glad you did when you see how beautiful Anna Ruby Falls is— and that there's a big, well maintained parking lot here and a nice visitors center, too.



A paved trail leads about 0.5 mile uphill from the visitors center. Informational signs along the way explain the geology and flora and fauna of the area. At the top of the trail three observation decks provide plenty of vantage points to view the falls. This video is recorded from one of the platforms.

Curiously Anna Ruby Falls is not one but two falls. Two different creeks, York Creek and Curtis Creek, tumble over rocky ledges and combine at the bottom to form Smith Creek. A double falls like this is a rare thing.

Georgia Travelog #15
Three Forks - Friday, 11 Apr 2025, 2:30pm

Our second hike today was visiting Long Creek Falls in the Chattahoochee National Forest. It seemed like it wouldn't be that far from our previous hike at Cane Creek Falls but then we realized our route involved 12-15 miles of driving on Forest Service roads. I..e, dirt roads. It's a good thing our rental vehicle is a crossover with AWD! Though in the past I've driven similar roads with front-wheel drive sedans.

Then again, things started getting a bit tougher on the drive to the trailhead when it began to rain. It was mostly just scattered drizzle while we were driving, but that turned into a steady pour as we arrived. Then it turned into a downpour as we started hiking. It's a good thing we brought our rain jackets today! Indeed we passed some hikers heading back to the car who'd bailed out before reaching the falls because they weren't prepared to hike in the rain.



Long Creek Falls is about a mile in from the Three Forks trailhead. It's a mostly gradual uphill hike the whole way. On the way in we saw a few other smaller falls on the creek with faint unmarked paths leading toward them. We wondered if one of those was our falls. Nope; the spur trail to the main falls was marked with a sign and blazes.

As we got to the falls there were about a dozens teens with a few adult chaperones there ahead of us. My first thought was Ugh. Teens can be noisy and chaotic and often don't care about the thing they're standing in front of. Frequently they're there because their parents forced them. These teens turned out to be fairly well behaved, though. They were part of a church group, and those who came on this trek did so because they wanted to. Thus they weren't doing things out of abject boredom like throwing every loose rock into the water and holding contests for who can scream the loudest. They also weren't whining incessantly about the rain. Though I think partly that's because they'd already been through way worse.... This church group wasn't day-hiking like us; they'd done an overnight atop the mountain. An overnight in a shelter while rain and sleet pounded with thunder and lightning last night! Thus when we arrived at the falls and wanted to take pictures, they politely made room for us.



If the teens were low energy because they were shell-shocked from laying awake most of the night during the violent weather (that's what one of their chaperones said) we were a bit low energy, too, because it was still raining and dreary. But still, waterfalls are waterfalls, so it wasn't hard to crack a legit smile or two while there.

You might wonder why the one falls pictures I've shared here is a selfie, especially after I included a selfie among other pictures from Cane Creek Falls earlier today and Amicalola Falls yesterday. Have I become one of those people who shares everything as a selfie? Haha, no. It's just a coincidence of a few circumstances.

One of those circumstances, a pretty significant one, is that I forgot my camera this trip. My spiffy, interchangeable lens camera, that is. Instead I'm taking all my pictures with my iPhone.

One of the things an iPhone (or any reasonable modern smartphone) does well is selfies. I like to explore the capabilities of whatever photographic tool I'm using. On some trips I shoot a lot of video when I'm using my iPhone. This trip I'm prompting myself, "Ooh, let's try a selfie here." So that's piece #2 of circumstance.

Piece #3 of circumstance is that a number of these selfies are simply good photos. When I review my roll of pictures after a trip I pick my favorites based on composition, lighting, focus, color saturation, mood, and story. Yes, that's a) a lot of factors and b) a mixture of technical and artistic considerations. Photography is a mixture of technical and artistic considerations. Selfies I've taken these past few hikes have been among the pictures I've liked best. And that's both technical and artistic. Technical, because the selfie camera on my new phone (6 months old) is way better than on older phones. It's able to deliver far better resolution, focus, light balance, and color saturation than selfies with older phones. In fact the selfie camera on this phone is at least as good as the outward facing camera on my previous phone. And artistic, because switching from traditional photos to selfies opens a new dimension of composition and story.

Long story short, I'm having fun exploring selfies, and I'm sharing a few selfie photos because they happen to be really good photos regardless.

Georgia Travelog #23
Helton Creek - Saturday, 12 Apr 2025, 6pm

Today has been another day of driving around the Appalachian Mountains of north Georgia, but unlike yesterday— when it rained on us most of the day— today has been beautiful. As a result we've had a fairly packed day.

Once again we started out from the Holiday Inn Express in Dawsonville— except this morning we checked out. Tonight we're not done 'til we get to Atlanta! But first there was so much else.

Today our first stop was in Helen, the over-the-top charming kitschy shrieking tourist trap of a town made up to look like a German alpine village. We thought it might be a good place to get some morning eats! Alas the German bakery we'd spotted yesterday was really a German confectionery. Meaning, most of what they sell ready-to-eat is sugary sweets. I didn't feel like a Bavarian cream donut with a side of cheese danish for breakfast, so we sulked back out to the car where I ate a protein bar as we continued our drive.

Next up was Anna Ruby Falls a bit north of Helen. This falls blew me away. It's reached by a totally paved trail. It's steep but doesn't have stairs like Amicalola Falls (which we visited Thursday). Its tourist-friendliness isn't what blew me away, though. It's that up at the end of the canyon is a double falls. Two different creeks falls the back wall of the canyon and merge at the bottom.

After the falls we doubled back to Helen for lunch. Yes, we thought eating in the tourist trap town would be fun! We scrupulously avoided all the tourist trappy places, though, and shared a pizza at a low-key pizzeria. Then we went back to that bakery we skipped out of in the morning, because Bavarian cream donuts with a side of cheese danish.

Our next stop was Upper Chattahoochee Campground to hike to Horse Trough Falls. This is one where the drive to get there turned into an adventure. The Apple Maps piped through my mobile phone into the car's infotainment system recommended a slightly different route than the Google Map I've embedded above. Yeah, make your jokes about Apple Maps; but this is the first time they've steered me wrong. We wound up taking a much longer drive on dirt Forest Service roads than we needed to. And a few times it took interpolating between Apple Maps and AllTrails to figure out the right way to go. But we did get there, safely, and had a bit of fun making it an offroad adventure. In a rental car.

Once we got to the trailhead for Horse Trough Falls— and OMG, what a terrible name— we had the place almost entirely to ourselves. Maybe other people got a bum steer from Apple Maps, too, but couldn't find their way out of it like I did. 🤣

The falls were a mostly level 1/2 mile walk from the parking lot. It could have been even shorter but the actual Upper Chattahoochee Campground was still closed for the season... despite signs from last year saying it'd reopen March 15. Oops, maybe the people responsible for reopening the campground got sacked in one of DOGE's mass firings. 😰

Horse Trough was another falls that blew me away. It wasn't as epic as Anna Ruby but it was still way more than I expected out here, at what felt like the (horse's) ass end of nowhere.

After Horse Trough we switched gears a bit and did a non-waterfall hike. Instead of a falls we visited the top of a mountain. And not just any mountain, but Brasstown Bald, elev. 4,784', the highest peak in Georgia. It was late, almost 4pm, when we got to the visitors center a few hundred feet below the summit. I wondered if I should've dropped it from the list to save time for other hikes but I chose instead to trust in the continued sunny weather and sunset just after 8pm to give us more time to play. We had a good late-afternoon visit up there and still had time for two more waterfalls!

Trahlyta Falls wasn't so much a hike as a jump-out-of-the-car-and-take-pictures situation. Yes, there was a hike we could do, but it was in a state park that had a lot of construction going on. It was a headache to deal with. So we drove out of the park and back around to an unmarked pulloff on the highway where we snapped pictures from across the creek canyon.

Finally we made it over to Helton Creek Falls. It was only about 15 minutes from Trahlyta, though it may have taken longer as once more we had to drive a few miles on a dirt road to get to a falls. Once more, though, the falls exceeded my expectations. I was ready for a maybe 20-foot tall falls. Instead we got a 100' tall falls in multiple drops!

Georgia Travelog #12
Amicalola Falls State Park - Thursday, 10 Apr 2025, 5:30pm

In my previous blog I remarked that hiking halfway up the canyon at Amicalola Falls was enough. We could tell that there weren't a lot of views to be gained by laboring up some 300+ more stairs, and we could get the view from the top by driving there. Indeed that's exactly what we did. We drove to the top!



And yeah, while the view from up here is nice, it's not let's-ascend-another-300-plus-stairs nice. 😅

What I Forgot This Trip

In the past I've joked that I forget one thing every trip. Of course that's not literally true, but it also seems not far from accurate. I often forget to pack something. A lot of times it turns out to be minor, something I can just as easily do without. Like forgetting to pack swim trunks when it turns out there was no hot tub at the hotel or I didn't have time to use it anyway. Other times what I forget is a doozy. On various trips I've forgotten to pack a clean shirt, clean socks, even underwear. 😱

What I forgot this trip is a doozy, though possibly not so... doozious?... as having no changes of underwear. I forgot my camera.

Now, you might be thinking, "LOL, how can you be like 'I fOrGoT mY cAmErA' when you've posted a picture in the same blog?" I mean, I'm pretty much never without a camera as there's one in my mobile phone. Actually there are four cameras in my mobile phone— and they've gotten really good thanks to onboard computational photography. But they lack some of the capabilities of my Fujifilm X-T3 interchangeable lens camera.

One of those critical capabilities is taking slow-exposure pictures with the help of screw-on filters to artistically blur the falling water at waterfalls. See for example this little explainer about waterfalls photography I wrote a year and a half ago.

In one respect forgetting my camera is even more of a doozy than forgetting a shirt, socks, or underwear. In each of those cases I simply bought what I forgot at a common local store. Buying a new camera is not something I can simply swing by Target or Best Buy for. I mean, yes, those stores literally sell cameras, but not the quality lenses and filters I carry in my camera bag on trips like this. And even if I could find such things at a specialty photography store, replacing what I left at home would cost several thousand dollars— not something to do on a whim. Or on an "Oops".

I'm still taking pictures this trip, of course. I'm just disappointed that I can't take pictures of the caliber and variety I'm accustomed to.

Saturday was a hiking two-fer for us. Thanks to staying overnight Friday night in Oakhurst we had plenty of time and energy even after hiking Angel Falls Saturday morning to add on a quick trek to Red Rock Falls around noon.

Red Rock Falls is on Lewis Creek, the same waterway as Corlieu Falls. We hiked Corlieu Falls Friday afternoon! We'd loosely planned that we could hike Red Rock Falls after Corlieu, making Friday a hiking two-fer, but the weather was crummy up at Lewis Creek on Friday afternoon. It was raining up there, hard. It was partly sunny and dry down in Oakhurst, though. The difference is that Oakhurst is at elev. 2,300' while the trailhead for Corlieu is at 3,900'. The rain was in the mountains, not the foothills. And Red Rock Falls is even higher, at around 4,200'. We saw small patches of snow near the trailhead on Saturday afternoon!



By hiking from the upper trailhead— the one with patchy snow— it was just 1/2 mile easy walk to Red Rock Falls. Well, the first 1/2 mile was easy; then a steep side trail dropped down to the falls. And even that just dropped down to the top of the falls, shown in the photo above. Waterfalls generally don't look great when you're standing right on top of them. Fortunately, here, a steep trail drops down to the left to reach the banks of the creek below of the falls.



We lingered for a bit below the falls. It was beautiful but also damp. The previous day's rain had left things soaked. Plus here, below the falls, it's shady and gets spray from the falls, so even on a dry day above it's wet down here.



In these latter two photos I managed to capture— or perhaps evoke— something that didn't seem to exist when and where I snapped the photos: a sunny day. Up here it was gray, at best bright gray, all day. But look: in these photos there's sunlight on the falls and blue in the sky above! For me, at least, seeing such things after the fact is one of the rewards of spending time taking pictures and touching them up afterward.

We got to the trailhead for Lewis Creek in Sierra National Forest a bit after 2pm on Friday. That would be plenty of time to hike to Corlieu Falls... and also Red Falls. But just as we drove up in our car and parked at the trailhead, rain started.

"We'll try waiting it out," we thought at first. Then it got worse.

The rain did get lighter again though not any lighter than when we first decided to try waiting it out. We grimaced and went about putting on our boots and zipping up our rain jackets. We've hiked in worse.



The trailhead for Lewis Creek, a National Recreation Trail, honestly looks dumpy right now. It used to be more covered in by trees. That made it harder to spot from the road but also increased the sense that, upon starting the hike, one was now "in nature" rather than near busy Highway 41 with cars rushing to and from Yosemite National Park.



It's not a long walk down to Corlieu Falls, probably less even than 1/2 mile, though on past visits I've met hikers unsure where it is. First you have to turn right when the trail reaches the creek. Next, you have to look for the trail continuation descending from the edge of a rocky plateau where there are great views of the creek and the canyon in the other direction. Then you have to carefully pick your way down a steep and loose trail to get to the bottom of the falls.



I brought my camera bag with me on this trek so I'd have my nice camera and my pack of filters— particularly my 6x neutral density filter. That let me capture the photo above with an exposure time of 1/6 (0.167) second. That slow exposure causes the water to blur like a silk curtain because it's moving. Unfortunately something else that's moving is the camera because I made this picture holding the camera free-hand. I tried to sharpen up the blurring from the camera shake, but it left artifacts in the photo as you can see above.

Ah, but I had another camera gadget with me. My hiking pole doubles as a monopod! I removed the cork cap to expose a metal screw mount and then screwed it into the mounting socket on the bottom of my camera.



This photo looks way better because there neither excessive blurring nor artifacts from post-process sharpening to attempt to solve the blurring. What there is, though, is my damn hand. Yes, that's my hand at the top of the photo above. I was covering the glass on the front of the lens because it was raining. While taking these slow-exposure photos (this latter photo is 1/5 second) I didn't want streaks or water droplets on the lens detracting from the picture. I thought my hand was out of the frame, but one challenge in working with the ND lens filter is that it makes the picture super dark in the preview. I couldn't tell my hand was still in the frame.

And the rain? Oh, it not only kept raining, it got worse. We decided to pull the plug on hiking further on the trail. We also decided to pull the plug on hiking to Red Falls in the other direction on Lewis Creek. "Maybe we'll do that tomorrow as a two-fer after Angel Falls," we agreed. And maybe I'll come back here as a three-fer to photograph Corlieu Falls without my hand!

Hawk and I have made our own Super Bowl Sunday tradition. Since we don't care for sportsball we take advantage of the day everyone is inside guzzling chips and guacamole while glued to their TVs to go hiking instead. For this year's not-watch party we drove up to the North Bay, to the Marin Municipal Water District on the flanks of Mt. Tamalpais.

What's there? Among other things, a bunch of waterfall trails. And the weather we've had the past week— rainy most of the week but clear and sunny Saturday and Sunday— made it a perfect time to hike waterfalls. In particular we headed to the Cataract Falls Trail, with an option of doing Carson Falls nearby as a two-fer later in the day.



It's a surprisingly long drive out to the Cataract Trail. ...Not because of how far it is; it was only 70 miles or so from home, most of those miles on freeways. But the last 10 or so miles winding into the mountains from the town of Fairfax, California are on narrow, twisty Fairfax-Bolinas Road. Making it even slower than normal was the fact that there are still a few construction spots where Caltrans is still repairing washout damage from a few years ago.

Speaking of a few years ago, it's been two years since our previous visit to Cataract Falls. So while we've been here a few times before, it was clearly time to visit again.



The trail begins at the back corner of MMWD's Lake Alpine on the flanks of Mt. Tamalpais. As you can see in the pic looking across the lake it's a clear and sunny day. But quickly the trail turns into the deep Cataract Canyon, and suddenly everything is cool and damp and dark.



The trail passes by several waterfalls as it climbs the canyon. For many of them, like those in the latter two photos here, there are small use-trails to get closer to the water. One of these photos I made while actually standing in the water. Yay, sturdy hiking boots instead of shitty trail shoes.



There are more individual waterfalls on this trail than I can even count, let alone share photos for. I've included these two for now. I'll post a Part Two soon with photos of the biggest cascade.

Stay tuned for more!

Panama Travelog #26
Soberania National Park, Panama - Fri, 27 Dec 2024. 2pm.

This is another blog I've unstuck from my Panama trip backlog.

Today we're driving from El Valle de Antón to Panama City with a a few stops for short hikes. Around noon today we visited El Chorro de la Chorrera. Now we're doing a bit of revenge hiking.

It's revenge because this is a hike we tried to do Monday after we stayed nearby in Gamboa, but we were turned away by a sign that the trail was closed. The parking lot was gated off by a chain. "Maybe it's just closed on Mondays," we shrugged. Not wanting to run afoul of local authorities who might be upset we entered a closed park, we gave up and left.

We gave up and skipped a hike? you might wonder. Yeah, well Monday was a shit day overall. The first hike we did was a bust. It was supposed to be full of wildlife. We saw a butterfly. One butterfly. And the night before we'd had trouble with our room at the hotel. "Let's move past these snafus and get on to the next thing!" we agreed. HAHAHAHHAHA, was that ironic. Everything this trip has been a snafu.

Thus when we arrived back at the trailhead today and saw it's still closed, with the small parking lot still chained off, we were of two minds. One mindset was, "Everything this trip has included an element of failure. Let's just accept our bad luck and leave." The other mindset was, "Fuck it, we're going in!"

The second mindset won.



We parked in a pullout area on the side of the road opposite the small, closed parking lot. There was already another car there, just like there was a car there when we bailed several days ago, so that tempered our worries about whether the authorities would give us a hard time. Plus, when we crossed the street and looked more carefully at the guard hut at the start of the trail, we could see it wasn't just closed for a day or a week but looked like it had been abandoned for years.

The main attraction at this trail is a swimming hole and picnic area near a small waterfalls. There's also a nature trail that loops around about 1km. We opted to hike the trail count-clockwise, putting the falls at the far end as a bit of a reward.

Well, just like that guard shack at the parking lot has seen better days, the nature trail here in Soberania National Park hasn't been maintained in at least a few years either. There are two suspension bridges crossing the creek, and both of them need repair. I mean, we were able to cross both of them, but one needs several planks replaced, and on the other one the joint in the middle of the of the span is broken. Fun times!



When we got around to the falls and the swimming hole it was starting to rain. That didn't seem to bother a small family who were already in the water. I mean, why not? They're literally already wet. When I was a kid we used to go out and play in the rain on hot days.

The folks who were in the swimming hole started chatting with us in Spanish. We used our rusty conversational Spanish to converse with them. We talked about where we're from, where we've visited this week, and what our plans for the rest of the trip are. "What, you're not going to visit our beaches and mountains?" one asked, hurt, in Spanish.

What I wanted to say was, "Have you seen your damn weather forecast?"



It's rained every single day we've been here, and rain is forecast for the next few days, too. And it's not the type of "Oh, it rains for 30 minutes in the afternoon every day then clears up" rain that some tropical areas are known for. No, Panama's rain is on-and-off, all day.

Oh, and this is supposedly the dry season.

Chalk that up as another thing that's snafu this trip. 😡