Little Trixie Falls

Little Trixie Falls is an ephemeral waterfall found along a small mapped stream which occurs immediately east of Basalt Creek where it drops over Trixie Falls. The falls drop 97 feet in a single horsetail type fall where the small stream slides down an Andesite cliff to a steep talus slope below. The 1:24,000 USGS Mount Rainier East topographic quadrangle (as well as numerous other maps, including the official National Park Service map for Mount Rainier National Park) actually mislabels this waterfall as Trixie Falls, likely due to a mapping error which dates back decades which was never corrected. The stream producing this waterfall is quite small and will functionally only flow for a few months out of the year due to the very small drainage basin above the falls - covering just 0.02 square miles (about 14 acres). The stream will rely entirely on snow melt to sustain a flow, and once the snow melts from the basin the stream will almost certainly dry out entirely. When surveyed in early August 2017 there was a decent flow in the creek due to several large drifts of snow remaining in the meadows above the falls, but in most years the falls will likely be dry by the end of August.Considering Trixie Falls was named specifically, there is a possibility that this waterfall may have at one point also been named, despite being considerably less significant than most of the other waterfalls in the Cowlitz Park area. No evidence has yet surfaced to suggest this was the case however.