St Mary's Falls and Cascade Falls
RT Length 6.3 miles
Elevation Gain 1400’
I was a little worried it would be too cold to hike today. When I got to the trailhead it was 21 degrees. Brrrr! I met Tim at the Starsmore Discovery Center and we drove up to the trail head at Gold Camp Road and High Drive.
We hiked up Gold Camp Road, past the old tunnel. Tim told me they’d wanted to put a road through the tunnel, but someone decided to light a huge fire under the tunnel, making it unstable for that purpose. Hikers…lol!
This trail had plenty of signs, although some of them looked like they’d been there for decades (the iron signs). A few were misleading (the iron ones seem to be at junctions and are usually devoid of arrows) but this one had “Turn Back” written in Sharpee, which was actually the correct thing to do.
The trail to the falls was easy to follow and devoid of snow directly on the trail (but there was a lot on the ground). The falls themselves were completely frozen over and very slippery, so we couldn’t cross.
Instead we hiked around them to the right as far as we could.
Side note: We saw someone with their dog off leash that shouldn’t have been: the dog ran away, and kept running and running and running. We’re not sure if he ever found the pup? Also, it was cold, but not too bad. Our jackets and hats and gloves were plenty.
We hiked back to the truck, but it had seemed like ‘too easy’ of a hike, so we decided to take a side trip to Cascade Falls. It’s located very close to Helen Hunt falls, and is supposed to be a great place to ice climb in winter. There were a few climbers there when we got there (Tim knew them). Apparently it wasn’t iced over as well as they’d have liked, but were climbing anyway.
It was cool to see the way the ice formed over the rooster tail
Here are a couple of videos of the hike
