Hiking through the woods of the White Mountain National Forest, you're bound to come across some breathtaking waterfalls. What makes the waterfalls even easier to find is this handy little website, New England Waterfalls, which lists all of the known waterfalls in the entire New England area. Over the past couple years in my travels to Lincoln, New Hampshire, I have ventured out onto some of these trails in search of beautiful waterfalls I've found on the website. Two in particular stand out - the Falling Waters Trail and Sabbaday Falls.
Sabbaday Falls was the first waterfall I went to see. The trail out to the falls is super easy, less than a ½ mile from the parking lot and mostly level. An easy trail means tons of people and families clogging up the pathways to the falls and getting in the way of every shot I wanted. What should we (I was with my girlfriend, sister, and brother-in-law) have expected? It was midday on a holiday weekend. Doh! I was able to get a few test shots from different angles, but ultimately I knew I had to come back when there were no people. I figured the best time to do that would be sunrise.
Here are the test shots in crappy lighting:
So, the next morning my girlfriend and I (much to her dismay) woke up at the crack of dawn to make the 30 minute drive up the Kancamagus Highway to Sabbaday Falls.
Along the way, we stopped at a popular look out point that faces east. This spot provides a perfect line of sight for the rising sun. Time to get out the camera and make a couple pictures. Since I understand dynamic range, I knew I had to shoot multiple exposures of the rising sun and combine the photos later on in order to retain detail in the sky as well as the shadow areas. I took out the tripod and shot some frames from a couple different spots. I liked one spot in particular and made the HDR (High Dynamic Range) image from the photos. Here are the three exposures I used, followed by the final HDR image.
The final version:
Nailed it. Time to continue to Sabbaday Falls.
We arrived at the falls at roughly 7am, just past sunrise. At this hour of the morning, the low sun left the falls in the shade - nice, even lighting which is exactly what I was looking for - and the time meant that we were the only two people there. Finally, I can get my shots with no distractions. I set up my tripod and camera from a few different angles, got the shots I wanted and got out of there within a half hour. Time to head back to Lincoln to go out to the very best breakfast joint I've ever been to, Flapjacks Pancake House.
Here are the images I was able to get from Sabbaday Falls:
The following year, I found some new waterfalls on New England Waterfalls - this time they were on the Falling Waters Trail right off of Rt 93. Only difference being this trail is significantly more difficult and the highest waterfall on the trail is a 1.5 mile hike up through some very moderate hiking conditions. Learning from my mistakes last year, we headed out to the trail early morning style.
We got to the trail at around 6:30am and, to our surprise, the parking lot was crawling with people. Not what I expected, but that's OK - we were here to hike and hike we would. I threw my camera backpack over my shoulders and off we went.
The first waterfall we came to wasn't very far in the woods. Actually, I was really relieved because the hike up wasn't bad at all. This was going to be a piece of cake, I thought. I set up my tripod and snapped a few pictures. I had to experiment a little bit with the shutter speed because I wanted to water to be milky looking, like the images above.
I wound up with this image:
Those falls are named the "Stairs Falls" for obvious reasons (not obvious? The falls are flowing down a set of rocks that resemble stairs. omg)
I packed my bag back up and headed off for the next waterfall. How hard could it be? After all, Stairs Falls was a remarkably easy climb. The next stretch can't be that bad, right? Right?
Wrong.
It was basically straight up the mountain: you had to wade through streams, climb up over logs and rocks, beat the Rancor, survive the Hunger Games, and defeat Megatron. Victorious we were and we were handsomely rewarded for our conquests. When we reached the highest waterfall along the trail (which, by the way, was only like the halfway point of the whole trail), Cloudland Falls, we knew it had been worth it. I set up in a few different hard-to-reach locations but eventually found that right at the base of the waterfall, looking up, was the best angle.
This is the shot I took:
After I got my shots, we all decided that we couldn't go any higher on the trail so we turned around to head back down. But wait! My sister had been wanting a shot for her family's Christmas card and I thought what better place to do it than this beautiful waterfall? It was me, my girlfriend, and my sister's whole family including her yellow lab , Emmie, so it was the perfect opportunity.
I sat my sister and her family down on rock directly in front of the waterfall and started snapping. I knew I wouldn't get everyone to smile and look right at me all at once because of all the distractions (remember how packed the parking lot was?), so I took a bunch of pictures and would do some head swaps later on. The difficult part was dragging the shutter long enough to make the water go milky while making sure my sister and her family didn't go blurry from moving around. It was a delicate balance but I think we nailed it:
We eventually headed back down out of the woods, past the Rancor, through the Hunger Games arena, and back out the parking lot to head back to Lincoln for some Flapjacks!
I plan on another hike to some waterfalls this Columbus day weekend so be on the look out for the blog post!
If anyone is interested in completing these hikes, I'm providing a Google maps link below to each parking lot where the trails start.
