We arrived at Fish Creek Falls parking lot. As we emerged from our car, surrounded by evergreen-clad mountains and a pale-blue, sunless sky, we could hear the distinct roar to the Fish Creek lower falls. It was only a quarter mile walk up a nice concrete path to the 270-foot-long falls. WOW! It was awe-inspiring. And with no one around except us at 6:40 in the morning, nothing but the sounds of nature surrounding us and this roaring, tumbling water fall that can easily compete with any other well-known waterfalls in the USA.
We went back down after taking some great shots of the falls and found trail no. 1102. This drops down to the base of the falls, crosses a footbridge, and then steeply (and I mean steep) switchbacks up the canyon. This trail climbs to the Upper Fish Creek Falls and continues onto long adventures to Long Lake at 9,800 feet. We wanted to get to at least the Upper Falls. The path was wide, but granite rocks sticking up all over the place. I’m so glad I bought my Swiss knapsack and Swiss hiking sticks with titanium points. I needed both! The path moved back and forth among the pines and brush like a sidewinder. The earth smelled sweet, moist and alive. A blue jay hackled at us and a chipmunk scurried in front of us. I was in no hurry up this ever-escalating trail because I was looking for wildflowers that I hadn’t shot yet. I found a lot of what I term UNID (unidentified flower), which means I will have to go home to my 1,000-book library and try to identify them. Sometimes I get lucky and sometimes I don’t.
Now, from the lower falls to Long Lake is 5.5 miles. It doesn’t sound like much until you realize it’s a 2,500-foot climb always upward. Some parts of the trail are wide and hard dirt. But many other parts are rocky or partly rock, or you are literally, at 8,000 feet, traversing over striped white, brown, and black granite. There was a 12-inch ledge we had to negotiate as well to get to the upper falls.
Morning around here is the time to hike from a temperature perspective, and there are NO PEOPLE are on them at 7:00am. They’re still sleeping. We had the world to ourselves. As we continued ever upward, Fish Creek, which is as wide as a river and roaring nonstop, just like Mad Creek had yesterday, was our dawn symphony. I was hoping against hope I would find an orchid today. Orchids only grow in seeps (water moving down beneath a hill or on top of it—a very muddy, moist area) or around river banks, ditches, or lakes. I knew we were going high enough, 8,800 feet, to potentially find some. And there were lots of little ditches and streams of water. At every one, we stopped and looked, with no success.
I also noticed a lot of spent glacier lilies. They resemble a tiger lily in that they have reflex petals, but they are a bright, sunny yellow. And they are very hard to find. I found lots of stems full of seeds on wilting, thick leaves, but they were all past flowering. I hoped as we climbed higher that I might get lucky.
On my pedometer that I wear, we had already walked 2.23 miles to the top of the lower Fish Creek waterfall. There, the sun came up, and at the top, before the water plunges downward, there’s a lot of spray. As the sun peeked over the mountain behind us, it hit that spray and created a rainbow of colors! Wow! I snapped about 40 shots, hoping to catch ONE photo that would show it. I haven’t seen them yet, so I don’t know, but I’ve got my fingers crossed. To be standing there beside that roaring cataract and to have the sun silently send her fingers through that spray and watch the creation of rainbow colors was simply breathtaking. What a way to start our hike up to the Upper Falls!
We climbed steadily. We went through a wondrous grove of white-barked aspen, their heart-shaped leaves dancing silently around us. It looked like a forest of white soldiers standing at attention. It was beautiful, and the bark on the trees had all kinds of black designs in them.
Fish Creek was always roaring on our left. We were traversing ridges above the canyon that contained the raging, greenish water. This water came off the snow melt and was ice-cold. Finally, we reached the bridge that crossed the creek. And then it was another 30-minute steep climb with much more granite on the trail than before. We kept huffing and climbing. We’d rest about every 10 minutes and enjoy the view from the top of the world. It was hot now at 10am, and there were a few more people and a lot of dogs on the trail.
When we finally found the Upper Fish Creek Falls, it gob-smacked us. Imagine climbing over smooth, striated, loaf-like granite rock and looking down to see this behemoth greenish-white water cascading in a roar with spray that you could feel 300 feet away. Not only that, but as we carefully made our way down the trail, I saw glacier lilies in bloom! All over the place! They were huge, healthy, and beautiful, because the spray from the waterfall kept them well supplied with fluid. Their yellow reflex petals danced with tiny pearls of water that held miniature rainbows within them. This place was Eden.
As we got closer to the waterfall, which was very short in comparison to the other one, it more than made up with power of moving millions of gallons of water along its sleek, black-granite banks. Rivulets of water ran down the gleaming ebony rocks, and the spray lifted so high in the air that you instantly got body-sprayed by it. Let me tell you, the cooling water droplets felt like heaven after sweating and hiking 2,500 feet in a blistering sun overhead. It was manna from heaven. We just stood there, opened our arms to the waterfall’s might and glory, and let it soak us, cools us down, and revive and refresh us all in the same moment.
And, best of all, at this altitude, we had sub-alpine flowers--and there’s nowhere else you can find them. I found purple mint plant, but don’t know the name of it, and mountain pussytoes, with their small, white heads looking like Q-tips sticking out of green leaves. There was teeny, tiny Alpine Sandwort, a wonderful little five-petaled, white flower that raises its head from a matt of short tufted leaves in a colony across the granite escarpment. Short, conspicuous Oregon Grape, with its bright, beaded-like yellow flowers, were here and there. And best of all were plenty of nodding Glacier Lilies to satisfy any connoisseur.
After we took dozens of photos of this incredibly powerful waterfall, we wanted to climb up above it to take some other shots. There was a seep that seemed good to look for new flowers, so we went up it instead of on the trail. Dave found shooting stars! Oh, my! That was the second flower of the day that had knocked my socks off. Shooting stars are a pretty fuchsia/pink color with reflex petals, too. They were very small, and best of all, they were in colonies. I was down on my hands and knees in the mud and water trying to take good photos of these shy beauties. I also found some pinedrops, which are bright-red stems coming out of the dried, brown pine needles, a parasite plant, in the woods at the head of the lower falls, as well. So, for me, I found three great finds in the flower world this day.
After taking photos and getting drenched one more time by that spray, we started back. Just before the bridge, I told Dave my feet hurt and I wanted to take boots/socks off and soak them in a stream to cool them down. We pulled up in the shade at a lovely little trickling stream and I did just that. This water is ice-cold. I couldn’t leave my grateful feet in that icy chill for more than 20 seconds. After doing that four times, my feet and I were smiling once again. I’m breaking in that new pair of hiking books, and to ask 10 miles of them in a 2-day period is a lot.