Waterfall Lover's Guide Northern California

Reviewed by Bryan Swan

With the release of Waterfall Lovers Guide Northern California, it appears that Mountaineers Books - a highly respected outdoor publisher - is trying to establish another franchise series. Unfortunately they didn't appear to have taken the time to thoroughly fact check this manuscript when it was presented to them, because this is one of the most incomplete waterfall guidebooks ever written. Not only that, but authors Matt and Krissi Danielsson appear to have blatantly gleaned the majority of the content of this book the two other books on California's waterfalls, as well as some information from this website - all of which was done without crediting the sources.

First off I'd like to address the content. In authoring a book on the waterfalls in Northern California, much information is already available on the many well known waterfalls, but considering the vast area of the state which the book aims to cover, surprisingly little research appears to have been done on the noteworthy but lesser-known waterfalls of the region. In a state as big and mountainous as California, this ought not be a difficult task. Instead, the authors seem to have documented any little seasonal 10-20 foot cascade they came across that could be considered a waterfall, regardless of its legitimacy as such a feature (again, in California we ought to expect more).

More disturbing, however, is that the authors chose to include several features which aren't even really waterfalls. There are a couple entries which, though they bear a name which ends in the "Falls" suffix, are merely rapids along a large river. But this isn't what we mean by "not really waterfalls". Our scrutiny is aimed at entries like the Shasta Dam and Lake Clementine Dam, both of which are given their own detailed write-up and rated at 2 and 3 stars out of five, respectively. That the authors would consider the spillway of a dam to be a legitimate waterfall calls into question their qualifications to discuss the subject matter, however both features do occur on natural waterways, so perhaps there is some level of justification.

But the nail in the coffin is the further inclusion of four artificial waterfalls located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Unlike the two aforementioned dams, these artificial waterfalls do not occur along a natural waterway. They consist of man-made pools and streams, flowing over a concrete-cast garden style rock formation, dropping into pools littered with coins which passers by have flipped into the water. This gives Waterfall Lover's Guide Northern California the distinctive honor of being - to the best of our knowledge - the first waterfall guidebook published which gives as much credence to artificial waterfalls as it does natural ones. In fact, one of these artificial waterfalls the authors have dubbed so worthy of attention that it actually graces the cover of the book! In the state of California, which is home to arguably the best waterfall in all of the United States (Yosemite Falls), this is the ultimate slap in the face.

Adding insult to injury the authors have given all four of these artificial waterfalls ratings of three out of five stars - so basically an average rating. Some of the other waterfalls to receive this "average" rating are as follows: Roaring River Falls (45 feet) in Kings Canyon National Park, Royal Arch Cascades (1250 feet), Silver Strand Falls (550 feet), LeConte Falls (250 feet) and Tueeulala Falls (800 feet) all in Yosemite National Park, Upper McCloud Falls (45 feet) and Hedge Creek Falls (30 feet) near Mount Shasta, Leavitt Falls (300 feet) near Sonora Pass and Niagara Creek Falls (700 feet) near Donnell Lake, among others many others. We at the World Waterfall Database have combined multiple decades worth of experience researching and documenting the subject of waterfalls, so to us the reasoning for considering these artificial waterfalls equal to any of those listed above is simply unfathomable, and in our minds the authors cannot be considered to be credible sources on the subject as a result.

Secondary to issues regarding the selection and coverage this book provides is the lack of work the authors put into the waterfalls it does cover. At least a dozen entries in this book have appeared in only one other published source; Chris Shaffer's excellent "Definitive Guide to the Waterfalls of Southern and Central California". How do we know this? Well, none of the falls in question are officially named or appear on maps, and the way they are listed in this book is exactly the same as the way Shaffer lists them. There is also evidence that the authors used the World Waterfall Database as a source for some of their data - quoting Yosemite's Snow Creek Falls as being 2,140 feet tall, a figure we first established years ago. None of this is credited, either in a forward, bibliography or inline.

Perhaps the most damning fact about this book is the more than obvious lack of effort the authors actually put into field checking their subject matter. Our perception is that if a waterfall in question required a hike of over 2-3 miles, the authors simply generalized as broadly as possible, maybe looked at a picture or two on the internet and wrote a very vague, very short entry noting the alleged location and stature of a waterfall based on what they have read. This simply isn't how you write a guidebook.

Perfect examples of this bungle include the very short entries on the waterfalls in the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne in Yosemite National Park (which are all quite impressive yet garnered absolutely no emotion from the authors), Snow Creek Falls in Tenaya Canyon (Yosemite) for which they couldn't identify the proper viewpoints for the waterfall and suggest the hike is much longer than in reality (maybe because they never actually tried to go there), Blue Canyon and Silver Spray Falls in Tehipite Valley in Kings Canyon National Park - two waterfalls that are rarely ever visisted - and the recently rediscovered Whiskeytown Falls near Redding, which they cited using an incorrect name (though that may have simply been due to most information about that particular waterfall not coming to light until after the manuscript went to print), among many others.

Now this book isn't all bad. The publishers did a great job keeping it consistently in line with the quality of the most recent edition of Greg Plumb's "Waterfall Lovers Guide to the Pacific Northwest", sharing the same fonts, icons, rating system and quick-access guide at the front, but that's basically where the similarities end. Bottom line is this book has so many errors and inconsistencies that if its used as a guide book you'll only get frustrated. As the saying goes "you can't polish a turd" but The Mountaineers sure tried hard. Until the authors can show that they know what they're doing, leave this one alone and go get a copy of Ann Marie Brown's "California Waterfalls" instead.