The Cascades

Sunday morning, we had breakfast at the hotel with Chris, Mel, Heather, and Danny and then checked out. There was a plan to go to Cascades Falls on Sunday, but Casey and LeAnna were busy with family stuff, so Sandy and I headed there by ourselves. We headed west on US-460 to Pembroke and turned on Route 623 into Cascades Day Use Area. After paying the day-use fee, we began our hike. Normally, I would hike the lower trail to the falls and the upper trail back to make a loop. But we weren’t sure if Casey and any others would be arriving later, so we hiked in the opposite direction to maybe run into them. We hiked the upper trail which follows an old roadbed upstream along Little Stony Creek high above. It’s up on a ridge above the creek, so we couldn’t see the creek while hiking, but there were some nice rock formations along the trail.

We also saw a cute little chipmunk on some big rocks along the trail here.

When we got to the split to go down to Cascades, we continued on the trail another half-mile to Upper Cascades. There’s a split in the trail and we went right to head to the Upper Cascades.

This was my first time to the area when the waterfalls weren’t frozen, so it was interesting to see them in their normal state. Due to the rain over the past day, the Upper Cascades was flowing quite well.

We climbed down the wet rocks to get to the base for a picture of the waterfall. The water level was high enough that it was hard to get far enough away to get a picture of the entire thing. What a difference a rainy night had made!

After some pictures at the base, we climbed back up to the top for a view of the waterfall tumbling down the ledges. Then, we started hiking back. Back at the split, we turned left to head down to Cascades. This 70-foot waterfall is truly spectacular – one of the best in Virginia, in my opinion.

And this was my first time seeing it when it was not frozen. It started to rain while we were here, but Sandy had an umbrella so I could get a couple pictures of the waterfall without getting the camera wet.

Then we started hiking back along the lower trail, following Little Stony Creek downstream back to the parking area. The creek is rocky and has many small cascades and drops downstream from Cascades and the rain had stopped shortly after we left the waterfall.

We saw a small waterfall on a small tributary of the creek. I imagine that this waterfall only exists after a good rain. We stopped at a couple more points along the creek on our hike back to view the pretty cascades.

Near the trailhead, we saw the old sawmill boiler that was used for power when the area was being logged.

Soon, we made it back to the parking area and started making our way home.