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Cataract Falls

Mt Tamalpais, California, USA

About Cataract Falls

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Waterfall Safety and Common Sense

Cataract Falls is really a long series of waterfalls and rapids starting near the Laurel Dell and eventually spilling into the man-made Alpine Lake.

During our visit to the falls, there were so many of these cascades that I don’t have a whole lot of faith in my count as to how many there were in total (I counted 6, but Julie counted 9). Personally, I only counted the falls I thought were big enough to be photo-worthy, but that was totally subjective. In any case, things like this are best described by a former college roommate of mine who’d say with half annoyance and half indifference, “DETAILS!”

The trail to see Cataract Falls pretty much followed Cataract Creek alongside the falls. Since we started from Alpine Lake, that meant it was all uphill to see the falls before coming back. However, it would have been an upside down hike had we started from Laurel Dell. Of course the ideal way to do this (assuming we had a pair of vehicles and some buddies to do this with) would be to do the entire hike as a one-way shuttle hike.

Considering the quantity of falls, we ended up spending a lot more time than we anticipated for such a relatively short hike distance-wise. Our GPS records show that we hiked 4.4 miles round trip, but that might be an overestimate due to lost satellite lock in some of the forest cover. In the literature, Ann Marie Brown has it at 3.2 miles round trip while I’ve seen another website report the distance at 2.6 miles return.

As for the Cataract Falls themselves, I’d guess that each notable cascade was between say 15ft to maybe 70ft (keep in mind this was a total guess and just our gut feeling). I swear it was easy to double book some of the falls as some viewpoints were of the same cascade from a different vantage point. Then again, we thought we saw so many waterfalls on this excursion that we probably ended up being waterfall-saturated.

I’ve heard that the falls does have a fairly short season so you probably want to time a visit here for the late Winter and Spring months and not long after the last rain storm. Moreover, the rainfall of the current year must also be at least average or above average since we’ve had instances where there were dry Winters. In our situation, we showed up in 2010 (a heavy rainfall year) and we didn’t think it rained significantly for a few weeks (at least in our neck of the woods, it didn’t rain for a month). So the photos you see on this web page probably reflect something close to average waterflow.

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Tagged with: tamalpais, marin, san francisco, bay area, central coast, california, waterfall



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