Mother Walker Falls

Mother Walker Falls is the uppermost of three significant waterfalls along the Bear River within Grafton Notch State Park, but despite a sign identifying the falls immediately adjacent to the road very few people ever actually see the falls itself. The sign adjacent to the road cites the gorge as being 43 feet deep, and the river tumbling 98 feet down the falls, but because the actual falls are located about 100 yards downstream from where the sign is located, most visitors are confused as to what feature the falls actually are. The book Waterfalls of the White Mountains by Bruce and Doreen Bolnick even misidentifies the falls as a 3-4 foot tumble within a boulder cave located just behind the parking area. The actual falls have no developed access, and as they fall away from the road, there is no easy way to view it either. Coupled with those factors, because the falls consist of a series of cascades intermixed among huge boulders which have gathered in the canyon, even reaching the base of the falls is not guaranteed to offer any sort of worthwhile vista either. The sign suggesting the falls are 98 feet tall is likely fairly accurate – the river does indeed tumble about 100 feet below the parking area, but no individual leap is more than perhaps 15 feet tall at most. The most visible drop is located near the bottom, but much of the upper half of the falls is almost entirely obstructed from view as the river dives into caves and crevices between boulders. The drainage area upstream from Mother Walker Falls covers an area of about 3.4 square miles, and while the river should never run dry due to several small marshes and bogs which contribute to its flow, because of how the falls interact with the boulders in the gorge, the falls will hardly be visible unless there is a healthy flow of water present in the river – best time to visit will be in the late spring as the winter’s snow is mostly but not entirely melted off of the surrounding mountains.