Somehow I lived in Maple Ridge my entire adolescent life and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been to Cliff Falls. I know it was a place that friends from high school went to to drink at, and I’m pretty sure at some point I heard about someone dying there, but somehow I never ended up going there myself.
Decided to take a trip out there on a boring day in April when I was going through to head back home from something or other. I don’t think I actually even parked in the right place, just along the back road where there was a trail that would go from the road to the park.
I’m not going to lie, I was a little disappointed. It seemed much smaller than it should have been, at least the falls part of it. It is Maple Ridge, so it wasn’t going to be huge or anything, but it really felt like you walk down a trail, get to a cul-de-sac type look where you can gaze out at the falls from afar (a fence telling you to stay away from the edge, danger danger Will Robinson and all that), and then a trail back out. It’s also possible I didn’t explore as much as I could have and may have just missed a whole lot.
I’m a good boy so of course I stayed on the right side of the fence. Mostly. The lookout over the falls was fairly steep, and I definitely wasn’t going to get down that easily, so I didn’t. I did however find a different part where you could jump the fence and get a bit closer to the water. It wasn’t super interesting through.
I got down low for a couple of shots looking back towards the bridge that people go over, and played around with slow shutter speeds, but I had no tripod so I had to make do with handheld and putting the camera down on the rock to try to get longer exposures.
After a while I just kinda bailed. I need to do some more looking online to see what other photos people have done there if I go back for doing photography. I am happy that I can finally check off the “have actually visited a well known place in my hometown” checkmark though.
