Waterfall Magic in the Hottest Days of Summer

          It has been hot, hot, hot all week, over 100º in the valley. Monday afternoon I started to drive to Ashland for yoga class, then abruptly changed my mind. It was too hot to leave the mountain. For the first time since I joined this yoga class, I played hooky.  

          Nonetheless, I was in town yesterday, in spite of the predicted 116º, but that was because I was driving through the valley on my way home after a perfectly delicious night under the stars, tucked away in the forest at a 4000-foot altitude, listening to the musical tinkle of a waterfall after an evening swim that washed away all the day's heat.

            It was my friend Mike who took me there. We arrived, up a bumpy dirt road and down a mountain path, late in the evening, well after dinner. No one else was there. We gazed from the rim of a canyon onto a round pool at the bottom of a long, late-summer-thin, splayed-out waterfall.

We immediately set our sleeping bags on the ground and started the hike to the pool. The trail crossed the creek at the top of the waterfall, then turned treacherously slippery with loose dirt as it descended steeply into the canyon. Only exposed roots gave footholds. At the creek itself we clambered over logs and rocks till we came to a vertical rock wall holding up the waterfall's pool. Here we had to do a short spurt of real rock-climbing before we stood at the lip of the pool with the waterfall on the far side, forty feet high.

            The water was brackish and dark, pooled in a perfectly circular bowl in the rock. The top of the canyon rose vertically above us, its rounded opening thirty feet across. Some people in Ashland lead a "secret waterfall vortex tour" to this place, which they call a "vortex field and dimensional doorway. …Standing next to the waterfall pool," they say, "you will feel the full and majestic power of this amazingly powerful positive energy Vortex."

            Maybe. I mean, maybe there's a vortex and maybe a dimensional doorway, but certainly, no matter how you word it (I favor words like "magical" and "naiads"), it's a beautiful and special place, even in late summer, when the aquatic energy is diminished into quietude. 

             But I am not one for just standing next to a pool of water and appreciating its spiritual power. Although it was 8:00 at night, although the water temperature intimated origins in snow-melt, although the air temperatures at this elevation were cooler than in town, I didn't hesitate to think about dimensional doorways or fairy dust before taking a dip.

I swam across the pool to the waterfall itself, at the base of the moss-covered rock wall that was ceaselessly dripping, with long streams of water flowing through the mosses and silver drops splashing off rock surfaces. The water was deliciously cold. I was utterly enchanted.

            We climbed back to the top of the canyon in slow-falling twilight. The wine in Mike's pack was still cold. The under-full moon was glowing white as it slipped behind trees on the far side of the canyon. One by one, stars pricked their way into the darkening sky. The bear we had seen on the way in, dashing lickety-split up the mountain, lingered in essence, a fairy-tale bear. Deep in the night, when everything was still, I woke up to hear the musical tinkle of the raindrop waterfall. I fell asleep again under its spell.

            The next morning we hiked back down to the pool. I had an even longer (and colder!) swim, exploring the entire little round hole of the canyon from the water. Then we climbed back to our campsite, had a bite of breakfast, packed up our sleeping bags, and walked out before the sun became unbearable. It was unbearable by the time I was doing errands in Medford, but not to me. My bones were still carrying the cold of the waterfall long after I came home to the mountain again.