Steam Trains & Hometown Waterfalls
February 7, 2004
While on my fitness walks on the streets
along the edge of Van Buren's Mount Vista, I've noticed several
natural watercourses headed straight for the edge of the bluff.
Which got me to thinking - I wonder if there's a waterfall down
there somewhere? It's certainly possible considering there's a
300 foot change in elevation in one tenth of a mile.
Up top it's all private property, but the
woods below the bluff are not fenced or posted; so this fall I
found the area on a computer topo map, marked a course, and
transferred coordinates to my GPS receiver that I could call up
some day after a big rain.
Wednesday night we received 1.1 inches of
rain, which combined with some other recent rains told me it
was time to look for a waterfall.
I'm going to switch to another story
briefly about what happened on the way to look for waterfalls.
As I was crossing the railroad tracks at the West end of Main
Street I noticed something odd. There were 20 or 30 people
scattered up and down the train tracks. Now this was 7:30 on a
Saturday morning and it was below freezing outside. What the
heck? I shrugged it off and drove on down toward Lee Creek
Park, and noticed several more people near the tracks - some of
them photographers with cameras on tripods. Then when I got all
the way down to the park there was a truck parked in the place
I had planned on parking. I got out and walked up to the
railroad tracks that follow along the base of Mount Vista, and
there was a guy standing there with a camera. He saw me and
said hi and I said "I've got to be honest - I don't know
what's going on here. What are you here for?"
He proceeded to tell me there was this big
steam train coming through. It was the biggest one in the
world, had just been to the Super Bowl and was passing through
on its way home. I said thanks for the info and turned and
started hiking down the tracks. I'm sure he thought I was nuts.
I got a couple hundred yards down the
tracks and this loud train whistle broke the relative silence.
I looked up and could see this huge cloud of steam rising from
down the tracks. I continued walking and all of a sudden there
it was. And it was moving really fast. I grabbed my camera out
of the backpack as quick as I could and started taking
pictures. I didn't have time to adjust any of the settings so
all the pictures came out blurry.
I did a little research on the web when I
got home. You can go to Union Pacific's web page to read about the train and see a good picture.
Now on with the waterfall story. Further
down the tracks I came upon a small stream tumbling down the
mountain and making all kinds of racket - but my GPS told me I
wasn't at the main watercourse yet so I went on down a couple
hundred yards and came to an even bigger stream, and there was
a decent amount of water in it. There were no fences or
no-trespassing signs so I headed up the mountain along the
stream. To make a long story short I did find a nice little 14
to 18 foot waterfall. I'm sure there are a few people who know
about it - probably some of the nearby property owners or their
kids or grandchildren. There was a yellow plastic bowl at the
foot of the falls. It’s neat to know there’s a
waterfall in my hometown.
