As we were getting our first view of Swanson creek, one of us piped up "look at the lady bug orgy." Indeed all over twig junctions were massive amounts of lady bugs. It probably wasn't really an orgy but it was fascinating to see them all just sitting there in such large numbers. On returning from the hike, after a little web surfing, I discovered that the lady bugs were sorta hibernating. Not as exciting as an orgy but I wouldn't have thought that lady bugs sleep away the winter!
After the lady bugs, we started coming across the many waterfalls on this hike. The first waterfall was Lower falls. The next was Lower and Upper Black Rock falls. We saw more lady bugs at the bottom of Lower Black Rock fall congregating on the bridge railings. After Black Rock falls we saw Upper Falls and right around the corner, Basin Falls. All these falls were beautiful with lots of water coming down them from all the rain we got in late February. Speaking of rain, we were still rain free at this point in the hike.
After Upper falls we abandoned water falls for a bit. We hiked up hill next to Swanson creek to the start of Contour ridge. We had to cross Swanson creek on the way up, our raging stream crossing -- NOT -- it was a very easy mellow crossing but our imaginations turned it into a raging crossing! When we reached the ridge and the place we were to leave Swanson creek, we took a lunch break. One of us sat near a banana slug and we had fun during lunch watching its surprisingly quick progress in moving along the rock over some moss as we ate our lunch.
We had a nice hike along Contour ridge enjoying the views through the trees. We saw many Madrones and some Manzanita trees. The Contour trail ended at Alec Canyon fire road. We stopped for a rest at a nice view point with a bench on Alec Canyon before descending to the Triple Falls trail. The Triple Falls trail was all up hill but very short at .2 miles. The trail deadends at the falls. The falls are called Triple Falls as there were three different shelves that the water flowed over. We enjoyed our last falls and one of us noted that on this hike we averaged a little over one waterfall per mile!
The last bit of the hike left the waterfalls behind and had us descending a steep fire road back to the parking lot. We were glad to be going down the hill and we now understood why the map had "steep" written on the Alec Canyon trail. We got back to the cars around 2:30 p.m. and were happy that we never felt a drop of rain on the entire hike! It turned out to be a marvelous day for a water fall hike: plenty of water to see cascade over the falls but none falling from the sky!
Cathy