[aywolfpac]

Hey. First post here. Yesterday afternoon, we decided to go for a little walk/hike so we decided to try and find the falls on Gilligan Creek in Skagit Valley. We drove about 20 minutes to a gated logging road and walked around 1.25 miles to the end of the road and the small falls. The weather was really nice: sunny and cool. The logging road had some snow, but nothing too bad. The road probably climbed around 400' in the mile plus walk.

The falls are only about 25' tall but are located in a very nice little gorge with some big cliffs covered in ferns and moss. The Skagit PUD has a little facility of some kind built at the bottom of the falls. There's a cool little footbridge that goes out to a valve that controls how much of the creek is diverted for some purpose or another. Yesterday, icicles were everywhere and the ice on the little bridge was around 2 inches thick.

Overall it made for a great little afternoon walk that got us out of the house. We saw a couple of eagles and one little mole or shrew. The water level was really low, so I'm curious to see what it looks like in the Spring with more water coming over. Aaron

[Bryan K]

Welcome to the site. Love the second shot, thanks for sharing

[Sore Feet]

Right on Aaron. Might have known the PUD had that one eyeballed in some way or another since the only way I found out about it was via an Army Corp of Engineers map.

[bobbi]

welcome aywolfpac! ditto on that second photo

[Backpacker Joe]

Welcome Wolfy. Nice work. Keep it up.

[aywolfpac]

The water gets diverted off to the side through some sort of contraption and then immediately dumped back into the creek (you can see it just to the left of the bridge coming back in). I don't know if it runs in there for some kind of tests or what. Doesn't go to Judy Reservoir though. I've been to Marietta Falls several times. It's probably the best falls in the Valley. You can go to my site and see more falls in the Valley if you're interested. http://aaronswaterfallworld.com Thanks for all the comments.

[puzzlr]

Aaron - nice site you've got going there. I have a couple questions. How do you avoid water getting on your camera lens in the spray around a waterfall? Or when it gets on, do you have a good way to quickly dry it? And have you ever had a close call while scrambling on the slippery terrain around a waterfall -- I watched your second video and some of that looked like a slip could be dangerous.

[Tazz]

welcome! nice ice shots.

[aywolfpac]

Hey Puzzlr. Thanks for checking out the site. First off, I get water on the camera all the time. It drives me nuts. I usually just wipe it off with my shirt (usually have on at least 2 layers). This presents problems too because I get little pieces of cloth on the lens. Still haven't quite worked out the details of keeping the lens dry very well yet. Might not be any real good way. Bryan (Sore Feet) might have a few other suggestions for that. I've slipped a couple of times but never anything real bad. The worst injury I've had was a really bad cut on my hand that I probably should've went in and got stitches on but I didn't. I'll probably always have a scar for a reminder of that one. It can definitely be a dangerous hobby, but I just try to be careful and if I get somewhere that I don't feel comfortable I just turn around. Aaron

[Dayhike Mike]

Nice! Great pics... Thanks for sharing!

[Matt]

Welcome to the site. Enjoyed your waterfall pictures. I didn't know there were so many waterfall hunters out there.

[Gabigabs]

Welcome. Great shots.

[Obi Tony Kenobi]

Nice falls Aaron, I need to get out there!

[aywolfpac]

Waterfall hunting buddy Brett and I went back up to Gilligan Creek Falls today. We were able to poke around the area a lot more. First of all, there is at least one decent looking falls a short distance downstream from the main one. It's about 15' tall:

The main falls had about 400x as much water as our trip in the ice had. Here's what it looked like today:

After dinking around the lower area, we decided to try and get up above the falls. I thought there was a decent chance that there were more tiers to the falls above what could be seen. It took us a good half hour of climbing up a steep clearcut before we got up there. We didn't find anymore tiers of the main falls, but we did find two other small falls on Gilligan Creek and another falls that dropped into Gilligan Creek. First up was Paradise Falls (named by Brett). In order to get a good view of this one, we just had to go across a nice little "bridge":

Paradise Falls is 3 tiers with heights of 3, 5, and 12 feet from top to bottom. In the picture below you can just make out the middle tier and the small top tier cannot be seen. It's not real tall, but is extremely pretty:

Right next to Paradise Falls, another small stream dumped into Gilligan Creek in a nice cascade. It was probably about 40' tall and came down in two sections with the total width being around 60'. If there weren't a million devils clubs growing up through the falls they would be really nice. Right above this little falls was a huge log about 8' in diameter that hung out a good 40' above Gilligan Creek and about 60 out from the side of the bank. It had little trees growing on it and a ton of ferns. You can see it in the top of this picture:

Finally, a few hundred feet upstream from Paradise Falls we found an Upper Gilligan Creek Falls. We had to ford Gilligan Creek to see it and the water was really deep, really cold, and really swift:

The Upper Falls consisted of 3 tiers with a total drop of around 30-35'. It wasn't nearly as nice as the other falls on Gilligan Creek, but not bad:

That was it for this day. I would imagine there are probably several more of these nice little 10-25' falls further downstream that we didn't have time to get to today. I know there's at least one more because you can see it from the road looking down. I guess we'll have to save that for next time. Aaron