Grand Falls

Grand Falls was certainly one of the most attractive waterfalls that we’ve seen in the US (let alone the American Southwest). What made this proclaimed 181ft waterfall so attractive was its width combined with the multiple terraces before plunging in three tall leaps.

In addition to the waterfall’s dimensions, the surrounding scenery seemed to be a microcosm of the mighty Grand Canyon itself as we were literally looking into a mini-gorge with intriguing Grand Canyon-like cliffs. And like the mighty Colorado River, the Little Colorado River possessed a muddy color which gave this waterfall it’s chocolate-like appearance. With some imagination, this waterfall could’ve appeared in the Willy Wonka’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie given its “Chocolate Falls” characteristic.

So when we considered all the rather memorable and unusual aspects about this waterfall, it was no wonder why Julie and I found this waterfall to stand out as both memorable and awe inspiring. We even included it on our Top 10 USA Waterfalls List at one point in time!

However, with all the superlatives we’re throwing at this waterfall, there are a pair of caveats. First, we had to time our visit for the narrow window of March through April and possibly May depending on how much snow had been accumulated in the White Mountains, which drained into the Little Colorado River. Otherwise, the falls would quickly trickle until going dry for the rest of the year except for a brief revitalization from the thunderstorms of the Summer monsoons. Since timing the monsoon (not to mention the flash flooding complications) would impact the reliability of the waterfalling experience, coming in the Summer just wasn’t palatable to us (not to mention the intense Summer heat of the deserts here).

On a subsequent visit to Grand Falls in late March 2018, we also proved that even the snowmelt months are no guarantee of its flow. For on that visit, there was no water going over the falls. There were only a few standing pools of water at its base. So the bottom line is that the snowpack on the White Mountains must be significant enough to feed the Little Colorado River, then timing a visit for the snowmelt would work.

The second caveat was that we had to figure out how to find this waterfall (see directions below). It wasn’t exactly a well-signed attraction and we were glad we used a combination of a GPS with TOPO! map to help us out (though it did lead to a little bit of confusion as the map had some outdated road lines).

Once managed to find the car park, we were at the top of the falls. We noticed a handful of lookout gazeebos perched right at the cliff’s edges providing various angles of the impressive falls itself as we walked around the rim of the gorge that the falls plunged into.

As we got towards more frontal views of the falls from the gorge rim, we noticed that there was a rather informal and somewhat hidden black-sand pebbled path where some minor scrambling was required to get into a gully that was further downstream of the falls. That gully would ultimately lead us to the banks of the Little Colorado River where we would eventually get right across the river to the front of the falls where we could feel the spray of the attractive Grand Falls while seeing rainbows in the process.

The scrambling wasn’t too bad as we merely needed to take our time to ensure we weren’t careless in trying to shortcut dropoffs or recognizing that where we might have gone the wrong way (and ended up at a dropoff). However, the path was reasonably doable for us and wasn’t as scary as say the Mooney Falls descent.

Once we were at the bottom, we even witnessed some people scramble up behind one of the side tiers of the falls after negotiating a real muddy stretch drenched by the falls’ spray. Julie and I didn’t bother doing that as we didn’t feel like traversing the muddy stretch and incurring additional risk at scrambling up the cliffs towards the middle tiers of the falls. Indeed, we were pretty content with the waterfall experience just from the relative safety of the view from across the river.

Despite the unsigned nature of this attraction, it was still quite popular as we shared it with at least a half-dozen carloads of people or so. We suspected many were locals though (either of Flagstaff or of the Navajo Reservation) or tourists who looked for gems like this on the internet. 🙂