Curtain Falls
Aug. 16th, 2017 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flyminion
Today, Cade and I went to Curtain Falls on the Middle Fork Feather River at Bald Rock Dome near Oroville, CA. We had initially planned to visit nearby Seven Falls, but Cade was leery of driving his car on any more dirt roads after Monday’s misadventure, so we were trying to see if we could find any indication online of the road conditions. In doing so, we found that the road was closed for repairs, so I suggested we do Curtain Falls instead, as I wanted to hit at least one swimming hole in the Feather River system (tangent: the pun-master in me finds it amusing that the Feather River is part of the Plumas National Forest). Bald Rock Dome also requires some gravel road driving, but the trailhead is a little more “official”, so we thought the road would probably be reasonably maintained. I actually recommended this place for Bald Rock Dome more than Curtain Falls per se. By this point in the trip, we were almost certainly not going to make it to Yosemite, so I thought Bald Rock Dome might round things out by providing a little Yosemite-esque scenery.On the way out, we stopped at Lake Oroville to take pictures of a colony of houseboats.
The road to the trailhead of the Dome Trail had a few ruts here and there, but nothing a low clearance vehicle couldn’t maneuver around. We could immediately see Bald Rock Dome from the parking lot.
It was cool, but it was a little less expansive than I thought it would be. I thought the exposed rock canyon was going to be the prevailing landscape here, but it turned out to just be a three-quarter mile anomaly among the otherwise typical tree-covered Sierra hills.
The sign at the trailhead said that the trail was two-point-something miles down to the river, and it included warnings about cold water, swift currents, the trail being strenuous, and yada yada yada. The trail switchbacked down a hill, crossed a couple of small streams, and switchbacked some more down another hill before skirting across the side of the dome.
This area was lined with rails and chain-link fences. The reviews we had read said that there was a set of wooden stairs that were in bad shape. When we got to the stairs, there was a sign saying they were closed.
Some steps were missing, and the ones that remained looked really wobbly.
We climbed around the fence, and Cade worked his way down the rock pile next to the stairs while I held onto the rails and walked down the rock beside the staircase. After this, the trail continued down more rock stairs and through a narrow rock slot. At this point, we could see a partial view of Curtain Falls upstream.
After the rock slot, it was a short scramble down the rocks to the water. The water was clear, but it was a little darker than the South Yuba and North Fork American Rivers. There was no official trail past this point, so accessing Curtain Falls required scrambling over piles of boulders the size of buses.
At one point, I decided it was going to be too much trouble to keep my feet dry, so I took off my hiking boots and switched to my Vibram toe shoes so I could walk through the water in areas where the current wasn’t too swift. We reached a pool where there was no way to rock hop across. Well, you could try, but if you fell in, you would be getting to know this baby up close and personal:
The only viable option for moving on from this point was to swim across the pool, but it had a somewhat swift current down the river-right side, which was where we were. The water was 70 °F, which felt nice after the hot hike. I wanted to take my phone with me to get pictures of Curtain Falls, so I put it in a Ziploc bag inside of a small Tupperware container (I call it my ghetto LifeProof Case) and tried to swim up the pool with one hand holding up my phone. It was difficult to swim against the current with one arm, but I sort of braced myself against the sloping rock at the edge of the pool to hold my ground.
I finally got adjacent to a line of large rocks in the upstream end of the pool and swam across the current to them.
I used my diving mask during this part so I could see underwater and aim for areas that had shallow rocks to hang onto. After I got across the current, it was fairly easy to get to shore on the other side. Cade had gone looking for another way around, but he was unable to find one, so he also swam. He had an easier time than I did, since he is a stronger swimmer and had both hands free.
We climbed over some more boulders until we were greeted by the emerald swimming hole below Curtain Falls.
I turned off my GPS here, and it said the hike was 3.37 miles, including the boulder scrambling and swimming after the trail ended. Curtain Falls itself is a river-wide drop of about 20-30 feet. It plunges into an ostensibly deep pool with a natural rock diving board perched above it.
From here, the water goes over a rock slide into the large pool we were standing in front of.
I had seen videos of people jumping from the rocks above the falls and sliding down the slide, but the flow looked too swift today for that to be safe. To get past the lower pool, we once again had to swim upstream, which was a bit easier in this pool as there was an eddy that circulated upstream on the river-left side of the pool. The water in the pool below Curtain Falls looked way too rough to get into, but I thought I might try the slide a few times. I looked underwater in the slide pool with my diving mask, and the slide continued gradually underwater, so it looked like you probably wouldn’t get pushed under by the violent-looking hydraulics at the base of the slide. I slid from the middle of the slide on the river-left, because there was a nasty-looking hole on the river-right that I did not want to get sucked into. The slide was not long or steep, but the force of the water pushed me pretty fast.
I was afraid of getting sucked into the current beyond the slide, so I swam hard to get out of it every time I slid.
It carried me almost halfway down the pool in only a few seconds each time.
Cade and I decided to head back to the trail. Swimming downstream in the slide pool was unexpectedly difficult, since the eddy was causing the water to circulate back upstream. However, swimming down the next pool was pretty easy this time, because the current is straightforward (literally) in that pool. We climbed back over the piles of boulders to the base of the trail. There was another pool here, and I tried to get in, but the current was too swift for me to make it across the river to the calm side of the pool.
Cade was done swimming, and I decided it was also time for me to call it quits, so we headed out. The hike in had not been too bad, but the hike out was pretty miserable. It was still somewhat hot out, so I was drenched in sweat, and these annoying little flies were swarming around my head and trying (sometimes successfully) to go into my eyes and mouth the entire time. I’m not sure why, but the return hike was pretty exhausting. It couldn’t have been any worse than Monday's Royal Gorge hike in terms of strenuousness, but I think the combination of the heat and exerting myself while swimming upstream against the current earlier is what wore me down today. I thought we were never going to get back to the car, but when we did, sitting down felt AMAZING.
In summary, I was kind of underwhelmed by Curtain Falls and Bald Rock Canyon. They were sort of like a less interesting version of Tallulah Gorge in Georgia (albeit twice as deep and with prettier water). The swimming hole itself was okay, but getting there (or getting back, rather) was kind of annoying and more trouble than it was worth, in my opinion. Granted, a lot of swimming holes can be annoying to get to, but in many cases, the payoff is worth the effort, and having to boulder-scramble and swim to get there just adds to the adventure. I thought Curtain Falls was right at “worth it” status while I was actually at the swimming hole, but the return hike left a bad taste in my mouth (or maybe that was all the flies I ate). It might have been more rewarding if the flow were low enough to allow for jumping and safe sliding, but that was not the case today. I thought this place would be pretty cool based on the pictures I had seen (in fact, I'm looking back through my own pictures and wondering how I was not impressed), as it has been my experience that many things look bigger and more impressive in person than in photos. However, Curtain Falls and Bald Rock Canyon are more of a “what you see is what you get” type of deal; I didn't experience more of a "wow factor" from seeing it in person than I did from seeing it in pictures. I might have been more impressed if this had been the first place we hit, but the North Fork American and the South Yuba Rivers are hard acts to follow. If I lived within driving distance, then I would probably give Curtain Falls another chance at lower flow, but it would not be high on my to-do list if I were only in California for a few days.
