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Though the falls of Douglas are striking and dramatic, there are many more falls on the North Fork as it makes its descent into the Blackwater Canyon. Indeed, an intriguing entry in Philip Pendleton Kennedy�s Blackwater Chronicle led me to look for one of them. In Kennedy�s description of his scramble down the North Fork below Douglas Falls, he wrote: �This level of the stream, however . . .  leads you to a second large fall, a clear pitch again of some forty feet.� When I read that, my eyes widened. A second large fall as high as Douglas? I had neither read of these falls in any modern travel guides nor seen photographs of them. Was Kennedy exaggerating�merely caught up in the thrall of the cascades?  Kennedy Falls Following in the Footsteps I had to find out, and the only way to do so was to follow in his footsteps. With the help of some kayakers who ran the North Fork, I found the falls. I�ll call them Kennedy Falls after Philip Pendleton Kennedy, the man who first wrote of...

�Perhaps in all this broad land of ours, whose wonders are not yet half revealed, no scene more beautifully grand ever broke on the eye of poet or painter, historian or forester. The Blackwater here evidently breaks its way sheer down through one of the ribs of the backbone of the Alleganies. The chasm through which the river forces itself thus headlong tumultuous down, is just wide enough to contain the actual breadth of the stream. On either side, the mountains rise up, almost a perpendicular ascent, to the height of some six hundred feet. They are covered down their sides, to the very edge of the river, with the noblest of firs and hemlocks . . .� Douglas Falls The Blackwater Chronicle Philip Pendleton Kennedy penned those words in 1852 in a colorful account called The Blackwater Chronicle: A Narrative of and Expedition into the Land of Canaan. And who could blame him for waxing poetic. He was leading a party of fellow adventurers into a raw and relatively unexplored region of West ...