Seven (or Eight or Eleven) Falls (Sunday, August 9, 2009)

I’ve been waiting two years to do the Stanley Falls trail! I wanted to do it last time we were here in 2007, but we weren’t able to squeeze it in, so we made sure to do it this year. The weather forecast was for a chance of thunderstorms, so we thought, if we can’t see the mountains, let’s look at some waterfalls!

“It’s a beauty,” says the Canadian Rockies Access Guide (Dodd & Helgason, © 1998 Lone Pine Publishing), right there on page 214, playing on the name of Beauty Creek, the creek on which the falls, well, fall. “A little-known trail that passes eight waterfalls within a couple of kilometers, ending at impressive Stanley Falls.” Somewhere, we got the impression that after those couple of kilometers, there was a slog to an impressive eighth or ninth falls. This is what we get when we read many resources but only pack one (the one, by the way, which shows seven waterfalls (the 8th is a double) grouped closely together within the confines of the highlighted trail). You can see where this is going, can’t you…

But first, a quick tour of the falls on Beauty Creek: At the trailhead. A barely marked pull-out on the Icefields Parkway. I think I like trailheads like these. We only saw five other people all day! Quite the contrast to the over-crowded popular trails! Anyway, I thought this dike would be a good place to see a moose. It would be, but not while we were there. *sigh*

  Falls #1, cutting through a gorge. The only way to see it, let along take a picture of it, was to get close to the edge of the gorge (no railings on quiet, little-travelled trails).

Looking downstream and downgorge from the falls to a peak way across the highway and the Athabasca River. Nice rainy day, eh?

I’m shooting Falls #2. Person #3 that we met on the trail remarked to Rich about how I appeared not to be afraid of heights. Oh, there’s at least a half a foot between me and the cliff edge!!

Falls #2 (I think). It’s pretty hard to keep track. I didn’t start my sophisticated number system until Falls #3 (holding up the corresponding number of fingers sideways over the falls. Holding them up and down would mean there was a panorama preceding.)

Falls #3

It was a lovely creek-side path… at this point. Of course, this was the “authorized” trail…

Falls #4

Falls #5 & #6. If we’re going in order, then #5 would be the one in the foreground; #6 the higher one in the back.

Falls #7, I believe. This is the only shot we got of it! Would we have been becoming falls snobs? “Oh yes, another waterfall. How lovely.”

Falls #8 – Stanley Falls, “the tallest and most impressive.” Below, we see it “thundering down into a large pool,” just as the trail guide said it would.
 

But we must have not been impressed, because, we kept going. Somewhere, we got the impression that there was another waterfall upriver, and it was a slog to get there. Well, there was another waterfall upriver, and it was quite a slog to get there. Such a slog, in fact, that we didn’t get any pictures of the trail!

It was most likely an animal trail transformed into a backpacking trail, alongside of the hill over the rushing creek, with a couple of wash-outs thrown in to terrify the not-so-confident day hiker.

"Mtncat” of the website www.trailpeak.com describes this quite well, unfortunately after the fact. I found this description after we got home:

The end of the official trail is Stanley Falls, a picturesque waterfall plunging into a round pool, though there is no signage to indicate this. A better way to define the end of the trail is by associating it with the end of the canyon. When the trail spits you out on the creek bed, it's time to turn back.

Unless of course you're a waterfall addict, then you might be persuaded to push on another 2km using snippets of trail and the creek bed itself. The goal of this slippery and ankle twisting journey? A trio of waterfalls, each a glory in itself, cascading down a head wall. Beautiful to see but virtually impossible to get a picture of, take them in before turning back.

We didn’t know we were necessarily waterfall “addicts,” and we did twist an ankle or two (but not severely). Eight minutes after I declared, “if we’re not there in 10 minutes, we’re turning back,” we looked up and beheld a mountain-side waterfall, cascading down from 100’s of feet above (or so it seemed. Who knows? It’s not really charted).

Top

 Middle
Bottom, spilling into Beauty Creek. All three shots had to be taken from three different locations.

I think all said, if the last falls counts as three, that’s 11 waterfalls we saw, the last three more perilous than the first eight.

Next up – the Columbia Icefields and the Athabasca Glacier (yesterday, Monday, August 10). Here I am modeling my second new hat!

I love the strategically-placed waterspot on the camera lens! Hahaha