Looking past a pole towards the Big Tujunga Reservoir and the Big Tujunga Canyon RoadĪlready from here, we could look down towards the reservoir held up by the Big Tujunga Dam below as well as across the canyon towards the Lower Fox Canyon. This is one trail that you absolutely would not want to slip-and-fall and take a tumble down the steep cliffs.īy the way, Josephine Creek Falls can be combined with the Lower Fox Canyon Falls adventure, which I go over in the video below.įrom the unsigned pullout marking the trailhead for the Big Tujunga Canyon Trail (see directions below), we’d pretty much take the narrow trail about 160ft leading up to a lone pole standing up around a bend. In any case, I’d budget about 2 hours for this excursion, but you’ll definitely want a good, grippy pair of hiking boots, long pants (due to prickly vegetation), as well as a healthy-but-not-debilitating fear of heights. However, it’s not clear to me if that’s official or if someone local and not affiliated with the forest service volunteers the maintenance. Trail’ scrawled on it, which made me think that this might be either an officially maintained trail or at least maintained by a generous local volunteer Closeup look at a large boulder with the words ‘Big Tujunga Can. In fact, I noticed one large boulder that had a writing scrawled on it that identified the trail as the “Big Tujunga Canyon Trail”. This is unusual to me because I tend to think the amateur, impatiently-haphazard scrambling use-trails would take a more direct (and erosion-causing) line on their descents. That said, the trail had a surprising amount of maintenance, and even the route involved a handful of switchbacks. The hike to Josephine Creek Falls involves a lot of narrow cliff-hugging sections with several eroded spots where you have to be real careful not to slip and fall into the ravine!Īfter all, I’d imagine increased use (as more people find out about this place) and soil-destabilizing fires as well as subsequent storms will conspire to further erode the cliffs here to the point that it might eventually become impassable. Summary of the Josephine Creek Falls HikeĮven though the hike to the bottom of Josephine Creek Falls is a modest 1.8- to 2 miles round-trip, I wouldn’t say it’s a cake walk because it’s mostly cliff-hugging with quite a few narrow and eroded sections.įurthermore, it’s an upside down hike so all that elevation loss (roughly 450ft) will have to be regained on the return.Īs far as the trail conditions, I do wonder how much longer this trail will be usable going forward. Mom standing before Josephine Creek Falls barely hanging on about a dry month after my first visit in January 2022Ībout a month later, I came back to Josephine Creek Falls when its flow was barely hanging on so that confirmed my suspiscions about its highly seasonal flow.
#DRY CREEK FALLS HIDDEN WATER FALLS SERIES#
Therefore, I expect that Josephine Creek Falls doesn’t have much longevity, and I’d argue that it probably doesn’t flow for most of the year, especially if we’ve had a drought year.įor a point of reference, on my first visit to this waterfall, I timed it for less than 2 days after the last of a series of heavy rain storms that really hit Southern California through much of December 2021. Josephine Creek drains the northwest face of Josephine Peak so it doesn’t really have much of a catchment unless there happens to be snow on the mountain. Nevertheless, it was with these expectations that I prepared myself for this excursion, but it turned out that the hike itself wasn’t as bad as I anticipated provided some precautions were taken, which I’ll get into. Josephine Creek Falls looking wispy when viewed from the upper parts of the Big Tujunga Canyon Trail That said, I also had to be wary that most of their waterfall hikes tend to involve some degree of bushwhacking and off-trail experience. In any case, I credit the Angeles Adventures blog for making me aware of this waterfall (as well as other obscure waterfalls in the Angeles National Forest).
#DRY CREEK FALLS HIDDEN WATER FALLS FREE#
Moreover, AllTrails didn’t even have an entry for this waterfall (though I’m sure this will change as more people know about it given the inevitability of free information). Josephine Creek FallsĮven someone misplaced a waypoint for this falls on Google Maps (reinforcing my thinking that you can’t really trust crowdsourced information) to further add confusion concerning its whereabouts. Josephine Creek Falls (or just Josephine Falls) was an impressively tall 180ft waterfall that was elusive because it was seasonal and it didn’t really show up on any of my surveyed maps.Īmong the topo maps that I’ve consulted with were Gaia GPS with its premium layers or Garmin (though they did identify Josephine Creek).
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