Adventures of a swimming hole aficionado

For the third day of our 2019 California swimming hole marathon, Cade and I went to Seven Falls on one of the many branches of the forks of the Feather River near, well, nothing. I guess as the crow flies it was sort of near Oroville. Seven Falls was originally supposed to be day 5 of our first California swimming hole marathon in 2017, but the road was closed, so we ended up doing Curtain Falls as a backup plan, and we didn’t make it this far north in 2018, so we had to wait until this year for retribution. I was interested to see how Seven Falls stacked up to Curtain Falls, since I wasn’t a huge fan of the Curtain Falls experience (although Cade enjoyed the hike and the scenery of Bald Rock Dome). We actually saw Bald Rock Dome from a distance while driving out to Seven Falls today.

The drive from Chico was two hours. I had originally planned to stay in Oroville to shave 30 minutes off the drive, but we couldn’t find any reasonably priced accommodations there on short notice. The latter half of the trip was an hour of driving on twenty miles worth of desolate forest service roads. The road was actually paved for all but the last two miles, although it was a one-lane blacktop road with no lines and a healthy serving of potholes. The area was also heavily forested with large evergreens. The last two miles on the dirt road were pretty rough. It started off alright, but we quickly got to the deep ruts and rocks sticking up. We were able to navigate the obstacles in Cade’s medium-clearance SUV until we had about 0.3 miles to go and encountered some rocks sticking up that Cade didn’t want to attempt driving over. We parked and walked the rest of the way to the trailhead. We were surprised to see another vehicle parked there.

The trail down to the falls dropped around 1000 feet over about a mile, and it wasted no time with switchbacks. It was more or less a straight shot down the hill. I was trying to go as slow as I could without gaining so much forward momentum that I couldn’t stop, because there were a lot of steep slopes that one could fall down if they started sliding uncontrollably, which could happen easily given that the trail consisted of loose dust, and the rocks were all covered with loose pebbles and leaves. After a scramble that probably added ten years of age to my knees, we emerged at the river just downstream of the fourth waterfall.

Before I continue, I guess I should establish the layout of Seven Falls. The final five waterfalls are large and obvious, but there are several smaller falls upstream of the lower five, and it is unclear which two of them are considered part of the seven. I will refer to the falls in order from upstream to downstream. In other words, Fall 1 is the top waterfall, and Fall 7 is the bottom one.

( Click here for the full trip report with pictures and videos )

In summary, I thought Seven Falls was a pretty good swimming hole destination. I had been curious about how it would compare to Curtain Falls, since we did that as a backup plan in place of Seven Falls on our first trip. I liked Seven Falls better from a swimming hole standpoint, even though Curtain Falls was about ten degrees warmer, but Cade said he liked the admittedly more scenic hike to Bald Rock Canyon and Curtain Falls better. My only complaint about Seven Falls was the cold water, especially since we seem to be having a streak of annoyingly cold swimming holes on this trip when we would really like to find some with more moderate temperatures. Other than that, though, Seven Falls has pretty much everything a swimming hole aficionado could want: sparkling crystal clear water, multiple large pools and waterfalls to explore, plenty of places to climb and jump from, and warm flat rocks to lie on after a cold swim. I don't know if it quite beats Royal Gorge (Seven Falls has better waterfalls and bigger pools, but the setting was not quite as epic as Royal Gorge, and the jumping opportunities were not as good), but if I were making a Top 5 list of California swimming holes, Seven Falls would certainly be on it. I would definitely be up for returning sometime and exploring the falls further. I would love to get better views of the bottom three waterfalls, and I know there were more cascades and pools than what we saw today, especially upstream of Fall 2.