Monthly Archives: December 2012

Nice shot of First Cascade, as we’ll call it, described in Middle Trident Stream 01.

And here’s Second Cascade from a similar angle, with the actual cascade in this case hidden or tucked within a diagonal fissure. Although it doesn’t surfacely appear as impressive as First Cascade from these photos, it’s actually considerably larger, and probably the most significant and important of the 4 cascades as a whole. This day, I decided not to re-visit the lower 2 of the 4 in this series.

Small pool at the bottom of 2nd Cascade, not as impressive as the one that 1st Cascade empties into.

Rock pilings at the bottom that seem to indicate past human intervention. Again I must reinforce we are in a quite remote area of Frank and Herman Parks, perhaps the most remote taken as a whole. I doubt these cascades have received many human visitors. Which makes these rock pilings more curious.

We now move to a totally new find, a previously unknown tributary or second fork of Middle Trident Creek I call the Foreign One or perhaps The Arab or simply The Fourth. It may represent the most remote stream in the parks, and a source of extreme mysteries. This stream meets up with Middle Trident Ck. not far upstream from The Cascades. The below picture is of a small drop of water defined by a quartz veined rock at the bottom.

This larger drop is a couple 100 feet more upstream, and is also highlighted by rocks with prominent quartz veins. I believe I’ll call it Quartz Cascade, and I was originally tempted to name the involved stream itself Quartz Creek before just then settling on Foreign One (or Arab or Fourth). In total, I hiked several football fields worth of length up Foreign One, following its siren lure and then breaking the trance luckily before it was too late. The trip down was rougher than expected, as is always the case when following upstream siren lures. I should know better by now. But I’m here, writing these words, back safe in Blue Mountain with my wife and cats and comfortable house and job. I made it back.

This amazing hike unfurled several weeks back. Apologies for the delay in generating the text for the photos here. On this weekend I decided to try out a section of a popular local trail that I usually don’t hike. The following weekend, I would return to the same section, but from the opposite direction, and meeting up basically where I ended this first excursion, as it turned out. But the trail is not the big story here, but off-trail excursions leading from it. The first major find was a flat ridge area — a platform as I have come to call them recently — that could be yet another site for a future campground or art event of some sort. The trail I mentioned before crosses this platform on its southern side, not far from where it starts to flatten out during its projection away from a parent mountain. Not unexpectedly, the northern end of the platform ends in steep descents on all remaining sides, but with only the western side relatively free of brush and rhododendron, or at least free enough to walk down to the rushing creek below. The creek is what I call Middle Trident, and as the name implies, there appears to be 3 streams of roughly the same size that gush from the extreme western slops of Frank Park, making their way down to a common flow. The streams fan out below this commonality, roughly forming the shape of a downward pointing 3 pronged trident or head of such, as classically associated with the Roman God Neptune. The names Lower Trident, Middle Trident and Upper Trident for these streams, north to south, is made more apt by the fact that tributaries merging into a single stream are often called prongs. This general area is possibly the wildest and most remote part of Frank and Herman Parks as a whole.

The picture below represents interesting fungi found on Middle Trident Creek, shortly before a sharp descent in 4 distinct drops or cascades. Collectively this descent represents one of the largest drops of water in Frank and Herman Parks. A truly amazing place.

This is not one of the 4 cascades just brought up, but a smaller falls just upstream, and about at the same location as the fungi pictured before it.

Here we have the first of the 4 major cascades, looking down from a perch near the top to a large pool dividing this from the next drop in the series just downstream.

And here is a view from the top of the second and probably largest cascade. Difficult to capture in a photo how impressive these cascades are in person.

Top of the second cascade again.

A look back from the same spot toward the first and uppermost cascade.

Middle Trident Stream 02.