Mike Diaz Photography

Against my better judgement I decided to go shooting the Monday before we left for Maui. I’m certain that I probably should have given some more time to packing, but we’ll call it a birthday present to myself which was much more enjoyable. Since we left for Maui essentially right after I got back from shooting, I barely just had the time to go through and process the images.

It’s always amazing to head up Mt. Tamalpais, because you’d swear such a place couldn’t exist mere minutes outside San Francisco.  I’ve never been to Oregon, but from the pictures I’ve seen, some of what you see up on Mt. Tam isn’t too much different from what you might see in the Columbia River Gorge.  In this case, I decided to finally check out Cataract Falls, inspired by some of my Flickr contacts who were showcasing work from up there with the rain we had earlier in February.  Anyway, it turns out that Cataract Falls is a popular destination, especially on a holiday and not too long after considerable rain. I could have definitely used getting an earlier start, but my parents were visiting so I had some breakfast with them on their way out.

Cataract Falls isn’t so much a single waterfall as it is a number of smaller cascades one after another on a relatively short trail.  The elevation gain isn’t too strenuous (in fact if you click on the red marker on the map, you can see it’s only a few hundred feet total), and the scenery is beautiful.  Here’s the track log:

According to Mr. Waterfall, Leon Turnbull, Cataract Falls is a series of nine cascades, of which I managed to capture a couple.

After spending a couple hours around Cataract Falls, I decided to check out Rodeo Beach for sunset. Rodeo is a beach I’ve been wanting to hit up for sunset ever since I’ve seen various epic shots of the sea stacks up on Flickr. Unfortunately, the sunset on this day wasn’t exactly spectacular; but I captured a few frames anyway.

I’m not particularly happy with any of the images I came away with, but this is probably the best. I think the wider perspective and the vignette at least give it some character. I guess it just means I’ll have to get back up there again sometime soon!

After nearly a week straight of rain, the forecast called for Saturday to be a dry day. I wanted to take advantage and get back to Uvas since I figured everything would be flowing real well, even the off-the-beaten path Triple Falls. The shoot also gave me a change to fully test out some of my new technology: my Droid with the “My Tracks” app. The plan was to have My Tracks replace the small GPS datalogger I was using to geotag some of my photos. I didn’t know if the tree cover would present any problems (in addition to having the phone in my pants pocket), but it ended up performaing admirably. My Tracks even has the capability to export the tracklog as a GPX file to your My Maps on Google Maps, which I will ultimately use to catalog various hikes and shoots I go on.

In addition to the tight integration with Google Maps and Google Docs, My Tracks also gives me additional information the datalogger didn’t provide (at least not out of the box): more distance and elevation information.  For example, our hike came in at 3.5 miles and the total one-way elevation gain was about 600 ft.  In particular, the max elevation My Tracks reported was 1577 ft, which seems to be verifiable using the topo layer in the above map.  Lastly, one feature I didn’t utilize this time around is the adding waypoints to the track. In the future, I’ll try to remember to use this so I can place a marker when I’m near a POI, that way it will show up later when I upload the track to My Maps. But enough with My Tracks; back to the photography.

Our first stop was the unmarked Uvas Falls, which is off the main waterfall loop. You head out from the picnic area and as you start down the hill toward Swanson Creek, you veer off to the right and follow the trail East, where it will intersect with Uvas Creek. The waterfall is just upstream from where Swanson Creek meets Uvas Creek; a nice plunge of about about 20-25 ft or so.

After getting a few shots of Uvas Falls, we returned to the main Waterfall Loop trail in search of the trail to Triple Falls. The trail to this waterfall breaks off the mail loop shortly after Granuja Falls, and begins a rather steep climb up a few switchbacks. The trail peaks at about 1600 ft. with an bench and an overlook back toward San Jose. At this point in the hike, the rain was coming down pretty steadily, so we picked up the pace down the back side of the hill the last half mile or so. Amazingly, there were a couple small patches of unmelted snow at this elevation.

I had read ahead of time that Triple Falls is only worth visiting in periods shortly after rain, so I figured it would be flowing well since it had been raining for about a week straight — and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a nice 30-35 ft cascade down the narrow side canyon.

The beauty of Uvas is the fact that it’s so close to the Valley, but once you get there you forget how close it really is. I highly recommend a visit, especially after some rain.

For more information on the My Tracks app, visit http://mytracks.appspot.com/.