Feather Falls-Long Walk-Worthwhile

Last Sunday, a friend from work and I set out to see Feather Falls, up the hill from Oroville, California. When we got to the trailhead towards the end of the morning, we found that the falls was a bit of a walk. Nearly 4 miles of a walk. ONEWAY! We decided that since we were there, we might as well do the hike and see the falls. We didn't have much in the way of supplies but, a few beers and a few sodas should see us through. (Famous last words!). Just the hike in is marvelous, with a wide trail, copious amounts of poison oak and a mostly downhill walk to the falls. The "biodiversity" of this forest is tremendous. Uncommon trees like the huckleberry oak and the California nutmeg have each carved out their niche amongst the Douglas firs, ponderosa pines and incense cedar. This picture below is a fine example of a large old bigleaf maple. The sunlight shining through the green maple leaves forced me to stop and capture its beauty.

Below is a view of the full falls. My friend was worried that there might not be any water in the falls. The walk in was certainly worth it, as Feather Falls truly is an awesome sight.

This split in the falls makes for a very nice combination of granite, plants and water. As you can tell from looking at the picture above, I took advantage of my powerful zoom to get up this close to this small part of the big falls.

I'm still struggling with the exposure settings of my camera. I'm finding that more and more, I'm going to have to use the less automatic modes, and maybe even use totally manual settings on scenes that give me trouble (like waterfalls). I have played around with the shutter speed to freeze the action, in some pictures. I've also incorporated a polarizing filter, which helped me to get an enhanced rainbow in some of the pictures of the lower part of the falls. This one below barely has the rainbow visible.

With the polarizing filter rotated, the rainbow becomes enhanced.

It was a long haul getting out of there but, our work in the Forest Service had us in better shape than most of the other people out there. Before returning to the motel, we stopped at a local casino for a nice buffet meal for ten bucks. Can't beat that for a day off work.