NYFalls.com Talk

LGD,
I'm hoping to get up in the mountains in September. I've passed by these falls numerous times over the years,and always wanted to check them out. They look so inviting as you whiz by on the road. I'm going to make it a point to stop here. Could you be more specific in how to access the falls from the lot ? Not sure from your previous statement. I know where the lot is. Which direction to the trail ? Towards Keene Valley or Placid on the bridge?
(the trail to the falls leads up from a swampy area on the other side of the bridge.)

Many thanks !

Chris

The parking lot is a sharp turn off the road, if you're coming from Keene, then you practically have to do a left U-turn to get to the lot. If you're coming from Lake Placid, it's an easy right turn off the road. The road down the hill can be bumpy with rocks and potholes, so you have to slow down immediately once you get off the high-speed main road. Once at the picnic area, there are several places to park, but no designated parking area. Most people just pull up to an obvious spot that still allows traffic to get by. There is a small wooden bridge that spans the creek that connects the two lakes, you can drive over that if you want, there is a small amount of parking on the other side, and a nice gravelly area on the lower lake to put in a canoe or kayak. The swampy area is pretty obvious once you cross the bridge. In dryer years, it's not so swampy, just a muddy spot, but this year it's pretty wet. The trail leads between the bushes at the back of this muddy area, it's pretty easy to find. During the summer when the undergrowth is high, there's pretty much only one way to walk, there may be smaller paths to the various climbing routes to the side, but the main trail is pretty obvious now, and generally heads straight uphill.

Once you get across the small bridge, you should have no problem finding the end of the trail. The small creek runs directly between the lakes, and if you stand on the bridge with your back to the main road, and look up the mountain, you might glimpse the falls through the trees. Just follow your nose and head up hill.

OK, I'm well into my film scanning project and I found some not too bad shots of some of the falls above the main set. This is from a different trip than the ones that I took on a P&S camera that later got dropped in the river near Split Rock. These were taken in the summer of 1990, on crappy film, but at least at that time I had a decent "real" 35mm camera, probably a Minolta X7-A, but with a pretty poor 24mm lens that added a lot of distortion. But considering that there probably aren't too many shots of these falls by anyone, here they are.

This may be the extreme upper part of the main falls in the shot in the first post, or it may be the next section.



Even further up, definitely these can't be seen any other way than to climb up there. From the composition, I don't think there was any other place to stand to get a shot, so the perspective is really messed up. Most likely I was teetering on the edge of a very slippery and high drop off.



Once you get above these, you can look off to see Pitchoff Mtn and the roadway:



You can see by the height that it's quite a climb, and not an easy one. Almost straight up the whole time, with unsure footing on slippery rocks. But, it is pretty cool up there, with giant boulders made almost completely of blue & green calcite, and a bunch of other mineral oddities. I've also heard that there is a cave up there somewhere, but I'm not going to go looking for it.

As I mentioned in another thread, hurricane Irene caused quite a change to Cascade Falls. Compare this shot to the one at the top of the thread.



Taken from a spot a little to the right and below from the one at the top, because the place I was standing in that shot is no longer there, it's been washed away. The upshot of this is, the falls are now a good 8-10 feet taller. I should have taken some shots of the stream leading up to the falls, as the damage is more apparent there. I did take video as my friend was taking shots below, here's a couple screengrabs of the lower stream.





Sorry for the quality on those, my video camera is only SD resolution, but you get the idea.

Here's a shot my friend took while I was taking video of the lower section of the stream.



For anyone who's been there, the change is dramatic.

Can not find a thread on this falls even though Kyle makes mention of one. Good flow last weekend on the 4th. Still on a 1 to 5 I would give this a 1-2. Yes it is big, but there is no challenge to get there. It does not have a pool and as mentioned below, the base looks like a war or bulldozer went through.

If you want to kayak up in Lake placid and want this as a back drop, then maybe. Even still the highway runs along upper and lower cascade lake where the falls is.

David

Rather than repeat, here are Kyle's notes from last year...
Kyle's notes:
Re: This weekend
by L_G_D » Tue Oct 04, 2011 8:18 am

I was in the Adirondacks for the weekend, and it was cold and rainy there too. Did manage to get to Split Rock, Wilmington Flume and Cascade Lakes. But mostly we drove around looking at the damage from Irene. Keene Valley & Keene are getting back in shape, the roads are passable, but you can see where some people are going to have a hard time of it for a while. The greatest change that struck me was Cascade Lakes Falls. I will be posting some pictures later as soon as I process them, but let's just say for anyone who has been there and is familiar with what the falls used to look like, well, it doesn't look like that anymore. The falls themselves are pretty much the same, that was solid rock, so no big change there, but they are about 8-10 feet taller now that the flood has removed that much fill from the pool at the bottom. The stream leading down from the falls to the lake looks like a large buldozer drove down it scraping all the gravel and boulders away down to bedrock in some places. There are no trees or underbrush for 50 to 100 feet on each side of the stream and there are large piles of broken timber on both sides of the stream. The old trail is almost obliterated, and you just walk up the streambed for the most part, which has also changed course slightly. Amazing the power of water. There were so many trees cleared from around the stream that you can easily see the falls from the road driving by, and even well above the falls to the next set of falls that you could never see before.
LGD

David - I found the existing topic & merged your post with it. If a search on the message boards yields no results, you can always go here and probably find a link to the existing topics.

me? Or is LGD's real name Kyle?

I'm guessing you mean Cascade Lake vs Lake Placid?

Great pics! Are those from up on Pitchoff Mt?

Oh, yeah. L_G_D's real name is Loren. Kyle is some other guy.