Where's the best place to go chasing waterfalls?
This article is an adaptation of our weekly Travel newsletter that was originally sent out on March 9, 2021. Want this in your inbox? Sign up here.
By George Stone, TRAVEL Executive Editor
Spring fever has arrived! After a year of pandemic, we can safely say this is the only fever we welcome. Just as bees are buzzing, travelers are teeming around wild places that present lower risk for COVID-19 transmission.
An obstacle: Some wild spaces are getting crowded. Last year, 237 million visitors found refuge in America’s national parks. While that number represents a 28 percent decrease from the previous year, a number of parks experienced record crowds, the NPS reports. Among them: Great Smoky Mountains, Yellowstone, and Zion.
“If you’re hoping for a Memorial Day weekend camping spot, you may already be out of luck,” our contributing writer Heather Greenwood Davis recently told Good Morning America. “While national parks have been a really popular option this year, you may need to get a little more creative.”
One wilderness area to explore is northern California’s McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park, home to a waterfall that so impressed Teddy Roosevelt he dubbed it “the Eighth Wonder of the World.”
“Burney Falls doesn’t cascade—it explodes,” writes Miles Howard in his story about northern California’s most spectacular waterfalls. “Each day, 100 million gallons of spring water burst from a 129-foot basalt cliff face and spill into a cerulean pool flanked by ponderosa pines.”
Forty-two falls splash down across the Shasta Cascade region, many of them within an hour’s drive of Redding. (Pictured above, the park’s Middle McCloud Falls.)
“How Shasta Cascade became the Golden State’s waterfall mecca is a story written in the clouds and carved through the mountainous landscape,” Howard reports. “Along with waterfall chasers, the region attracts water bottling corporations looking to own the springs that feed the falls. Such exploitation, along with worsening climate change, imbues destinations like Shasta Cascade with a sense of creeping impermanence.”
Our story describes the seismic history that contributes to the Cascades’ wealth of waterfalls (and volcanoes and springs). And we offer a superlative way to go chasing waterfalls: On a 177-mile road trip that loops around 13 waterfalls and can be done over two or three days. “The area beckons visitors who find quietude amidst these thundering wonders,” Howard writes. (Below, Hedge Creek Falls, which shelters a cave along its base.)
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TODAY IN A MINUTE
Not quite yet: Vaccinated? Terrific. But don’t fly long distances just yet. Yesterday’s widely anticipated guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made several key allowances for vaccinated people, such as visits to certain family members and cases in which masks weren’t needed. But it did not update the travel guidelines, which many had hoped for. Politico reported that an earlier version of the guidelines had a travel section, but officials decided not to release it at this time.
Looks like grassland: The noxious weed extinguishing native plants in Southwestern deserts is actually an accelerant to wildfires in the area. Buffelgrass, a perennial arid climate-adapted grass from Africa, was brought to the United States in the 1930s to control soil erosion and provide cattle forage. Now volunteers, some working to protect their homes, are yanking the dangerous grasses from public lands, Shaena Montanari writes.
Once a gulag: The northern Russian town of Vorkuta was an infamous Gulag labor camp from the 1930s to 1960s. Miners later came to the forbidding area for high wages, but these days, it has reverted to a ghost town, CNN reports. For Nat Geo, photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva explored similar terrain, delivering these otherworldly images.
YOUR INSTAGRAM OF THE DAY
The Angel Oak: Down a dusty dirt road in South Carolina sits a droopy southern oak that is believed to be the oldest tree east of the Mississippi River. The Angel Oak is more than 400 years old, with branches that dive in and out of the earth “like a serpent in the ocean,” says Michael George. The photographer made this image in the morning light.
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THE BIG TAKEAWAY
Roots travel: Stuck at home during the pandemic, many people have begun to play detective, tracing their family heritage as far back as possible. The Henry Louis Gates, Jr.-hosted PBS series Finding Your Roots and a new wave of genealogical services are stirring interest. “When we’re stuck in place, firmly rooted at home, we start to question how deep those roots run,” writes Raphael Kadushin. Like many Americans, Kadushin says he didn’t know until recently from where his ancestors had come—in his case, from Jewish communities in Lithuania. (Pictured above, a traveler at Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle, which once imprisoned Africans before they were forced aboard ships to become enslaved people in America.)
OVERHEARD AT NAT GEO
Yes, Amazons existed: Archeological discoveries and modern DNA analysis say these ancient warrior women actually strode the Earth—and actually battled Greeks. That’s according to Stanford classics scholar and Amazon expert Adrienne Mayor. In Greek art, “Amazons were shown as just as heroic and courageous as the Greek male warriors,” Mayor says on the latest episode of Overheard, our award-winning podcast. Mayor says young Greeks 2,500 years ago even played with clay Amazon dolls with moveable limbs. (Pictured above, a battle scene between Amazons and Greeks on an oil flask dating from the 5th century B.C.)
IN A FEW WORDS
Life began for me when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
Willa Cather, Pulitzer-winning novelist; O Pioneers!, My Antonia, From Willa Cather: A Memoir, by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant
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Tomorrow, Victoria Jaggard covers the latest in science. If you’re not a subscriber, sign up here to also get Rachael Bale on animals, Whitney Johnson on photography, and Debra Adams Simmons on history.
ONE LAST GLIMPSE
An adventurer’s dream: Haven’t heard of Gates of the Arctic National Park? Its 8.4 million acres lie entirely above the Arctic Circle in Alaska and attract fewer than 10,000 visitors a year. It has no roads, writes Jenna Schnuer in the latest National Geographic magazine. You’ll need a rivercraft to get to places such as Takahula Lake and the winding Alatna River (pictured above in this image by photographer and Nat Geo Explorer Kiliii Yüyan).
This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard, and Jen Tse selected the photographs. Kimberly Pecoraro and Gretchen Ortega helped produce this. Have an idea, a link, some extremely remote place you once visited? We’d love to hear from you at david.beard@natgeo.com. And thanks for reading!
