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It is now about 40 years since Bill Burden and I last visited Cherry Falls on Cherry Creek in the Cascade foothills northeast of Duvall.  It was Larry “Jug” Vanover who first led me to the falls.  Bill, I think, was not along on the first visit.  Without a guide it would have been hard to find even with good written instructions.  There were many splits and turns in the road that wound up at a gate that was sometimes closed and sometimes not.  The last leg required a hike down the overgrown bed of a long abandoned logging railroad to the falls which splashed in a pool that was so shaded that even on the hottest visits the water was bracing.  It was, however, a splendid place for Diana and her stags.   I did some filming there for the Sky River Rock Fire film, which is now also a 40-year work-in-progress.  We visited the pool perhaps a  half dozen times after Vancouver’s first help in the summer of 1968.  He guided us to the falls following that Spring’s Piano Drop, which was staged on Larry’s perfect (for dropping a piano from the sky) property.   Of the piano drop I have both film and stills, but of the falls only film.  The subject attached here is unidentified.  Although it resembles Cherry Falls – as I remember it – I doubt that it is Cherry Falls.  Estimating the height of the man standing on top of the falls to the right, (in this circa 1912 glass negative) these falls might be sixteen or so feet high.  I think Cherry Creek falls is somewhat higher.   In the late 70s Bill Burden and I with an entourage of innocents in two cars tried to find the falls without Larry’s help.  We failed.   Perhaps next summer we will try again, but first call Larry.

ADDENDUM

Ron Edge – of our “Edge Clippings” – has found a visit to Cherry Falls by a mountaineer who signs his work “Hikin Coug.”  Ron ventures, “I assume a graduate of WAZZU.”  Hikin Coug dates his photo from this year – or rather last year, 2011.   So thanks to Ron and the Hikin Coug, and all the rest on Cherry Falls that is now up and showing on line.  Last time I searched, about six years ago, there were no pictures. While close in qualities the older photo is clearly not of Cherry Falls.  Given the characteristics of the collection it came from it is almost certainly from somewhere nearby.