Mystery Falls

Take the North Cascades Highway to the town of Marblemount, and continue straight onto the Cascade River Road - which crosses the Skagit River immediately - where the highway makes a sharp left. Continue along the Cascade River Road for five miles to the roadside falls, with ample parking room on the right side of the road. There is a private residence to the left of the falls, so please do not attempt to climb upstream to see the upper section of the falls better.This unofficially named waterfall is encountered right along side of the Cascade River Road as it winds up from the town of Marblemount to the Cascade Pass trailhead in North Cascades National Park. The falls drop 106-feet over a two-stepped fall, the upper tier plunging 61-feet in such a way that the creek shoots out from the cliff face in a powerful firehose effect, and the lower tier sliding 45 feet down in a narrow groove in the cliff, nearly splashing onto the road itself. The drainage basin for the creek producing the falls is not terribly large, but it sustains flow all year long. During the spring freshest the volume of the creek can balloon such that the lowest tier of the falls can split into three distinct segments, however it seems much less inclined to do so after several years of significant winter flood events (perhaps debris has shifted and clogged the channels where said segments would have formed). By the late summer months the falls are considerably less interesting.When we first surveyed this waterfall, we had assumed it situated on neighboring Day Creek, because the crossing of Day Creek is not at all obvious and we confused this as the first stream encountered along the Cascade River Road. Turns out that is not the case, so the stream the falls are found along became a pseudo "mystery". The 4th and 5th editions of Greg Plumb's Waterfall Lovers Guide books refer to this waterfall as Lookout Mountain Falls, while Bob Mooers' "Waterfall Finders Guide: Western Washington Series 1" calls it Get Down Falls after a patch of graffiti which was visible on a rock near the falls at one time (likely pertaining to the private land next to the falls).