Kelley Creek Falls

The Kelley Creek Trail is accessed from the Old Cascade Highway near Stevens Pass. Take Highway 2 east from the town of Skykomish for 6.7 miles to the western end of the Old Cascade Highway - just before the bridge over the Tye River at Alpine Falls (if you reach the Deception Falls parking area, you've gone too far). Follow the Old Cascade Highway for 2.2 miles then turn left onto NFR 6710 and continue for another 1.4 miles to the large parking area and restrooms where the road intersects the Iron Goat Trail. Find Kelley Creek Trail #1076 which heads downhill from the parking area, quickly passing the site of one of two old railroad trestles in the vicinity. The trail crosses Martin Creek on a sturdy foot bridge, then forks - keep to the right and continue heading upstream along the creek. After 2.1 miles of moderately easy hiking the trail passes near the falls - a few trees obscure totally clear views of the lower tier of the falls from the trail, while the upper tier is a bit more visible a short distance further (but still requires scrambling a few feet off the trail to get a good look).Kelley Creek Falls is a moderately significant two-tiered waterfall found along the newly constructed (or newly refurbished at least) Kelley Creek Trail near Stevens Pass. The two tiers of the falls are almost diametric opposites, the upper tier cascading down a sloped slab of bedrock at a fairly gradual angle for 24 feet, while the lower tier plunges nearly vertically for 67 feet into a large cliff-ringed pool. A tributary stream enters Kelley Creek between the tiers of the falls, and has a small cascade which drops in parallel to the upper tier of Kelley Creek Falls, but in order to view the two streams cascading together, one has to be positioned somewhat distantly from the falls on Kelley Creek proper (the view is right along the trail). The basin feeding Kelley Creek covers an area of about 2 square miles - all of it above 3000 feet in elevation - so while it's not huge, it's large enough to ensure a pretty healthy volume of water remains in the creek for the majority of the year. The winter snow pack will persist in the basin well into the early summer months, so the falls (the lower tier anyway) will flow strongly for much of the year. By September however, expect the volume to drop considerably.We have seen no evidence that this waterfall has any sort of historically recognized name, however the new Kelley Creek Trail was constructed along a route which was formerly occupied by a prospector's trail around the turn of the 20th century, so it's very possible that it was both known and may have been named at some point in the distant past. How obscurely (or not) it may have been known of is the question. For now, we'll continue to refer to it simply as Kelley Creek Falls.