Fall Road Trip #2 (Back Roads Water-Fall Tour)

Lower Cataract Falls

This past weekend, we did the Indiana Back Roads Water-Fall Tour” (I just made that up!) heading first west, then south, and finally east. We covered 5 waterfalls in one day!

It was a bright beautiful fall day in Indiana. Almost too bright for waterfall photography, but still a great day for a drive. We started out at Cataract Falls, arriving at 9:30, a little later than expected after taking a roundabout route to get there. This is a state recreation
area that has a covered bridge on the property and three waterfalls; upper, lower, and Little Sister Falls. I didn’t get any pictures of the covered bridge. The sun was rising right over it and it was just too bright.

Little Sister Falls

Upper Cataract Falls

While I was playing around Little Sister Falls, Eric went back to the car to unpack his fishing pole from the trunk. I found him a little later down below the lower falls battling a rock fish. Which, by the way, took off with part of his line and his brand new lure. He trudged back up the hill looking disgusted, with mud crusted boots, and covered with burrs.


After getting most of the burrs and mud off Eric, we took off to find 231 south to McCormick’s Creek State park. This was a pretty quick drive of about 20 minutes. We never realized it was so close. We arrived at the falls inside the park along with a bunch of other people. One big family was trying to get across the creek so they could get up to the water fall to have their (individual) pictures taken. (sigh!) I like my waterfall pictures with no humans, please . I managed to get a couple of nice shots while they picked their way across the rocks to the other side; then I relocated to another spot while they were taking pictures. I think they turned out very nice, sans humans.

McCormick's Creek Falls

Next stop….Yellowwood State Forest. Yellowwood doesn’t have any waterfalls that I know of, but it does have a nice scenic lake. On the way there we stopped at Chili’s in Bloomington and had a nice lunch. (Eric tried to convince me he saw John Mellencamp at a table by the bathroom…I didn’t buy it!)

The drive down Yellowwood Road, the road that takes you back to the State Forest from 46 is a nice, scenic drive. There’s a house on that road I would love to have! I had planned to just do some hiking here and thought Eric could do some fishing. The trees weren’t very colorful here for some reason, so I only took a couple of pictures. YellowWood State Forest

We ended up hiking for only about an hour because time was running short. We walked at a pretty fast pace so I figured we probably worked off that big lunch we ate. By the time we made it back to the car it was almost 4:00. We had to be back home before 6:00 and still had 1 more stop to make. It’s a good thing we didn’t stay longer because we ran into a BIG traffic jam around Nashville. Traffic started to back up almost as soon as we got back on the main road. I should have expected this. I guess I was hoping most of the leaf watchers were here last weekend.

The next leg of the tour took us along SR 46, past Brown County State Park, right through Nashville, and to a little town east of Columbus called Newbern. What’s in Newbern? A waterfall, of course! Well off the beaten path, on a narrow county road is Anderson Falls. I saw pictures of this on the Internet. This waterfall is not very tall, but is very wide. The pictures I saw of it were wonderful. However, on this day there was very little flowing water; only a slight trickle on the right side. But the trees around it and the leaves that had fallen still made for some pretty pictures. **Note to self….come back when we’ve had a lot of rain. It’s only 45 minutes from our house.**

Anderson Falls

We're going to try and do one more trip this coming weekend. Right now the forcast is calling for rain both days, so I don't know if we'll be able to. It's supposed to be warm this weekend, and the leaves are still very pretty right now, so I hope we get to go. Watch for updates.