Tugela Falls

Tugela Falls is a lofty but low volume waterfall which tumbles down the immense cliffs of a section of South Africa's Drakensberg Mountains known as The Amphitheater. The falls have been commonly said to drop in five distinct leaps, but in fact there may be as many as seven or eight, depending on how pronounced of a pause occurs between one or two sections of the fall. The total height of the falls is usually reported to be 948 meters (3,110 feet), with the the first two and most visible tiers of the falls making up a majority of the total drop in leaps of approximately 180 meters (590 feet) and 410 meters (1,345 feet). The third tier of the falls is the second largest in the series, but the exact height is not known. The remaining drops are neither visible from the viewpoints at the top of The Amphitheater where the falls are usually observed, nor from the valley below the falls where hikers begin the trek to the top of the falls. Because there has yet to be a truly accurate measurement of the falls, the height of Tugela Falls has often been cited with wildly different figures. Because the remaining tiers of the falls are hidden in a difficult to access section of canyon at the foot of the cliffs, an accurate measurement of the true height of Tugela Falls has not yet been established. In 2016 an amateur team of explorers from the Czech Republic set out to measure Tugela Falls in hopes to prove it to be the world's tallest waterfall. Their measurement returned a height of 983 meters, however the location it was measured from was found to be over a kilometer distant from the base of Tugela Falls and thus not an accurate depiction of the height of just the waterfall itself. Despite this, it is extremely likely that Tugela Falls is still the tallest recorded waterfall in the world, as the measurement often attributed to Angel Falls is thought to have been taken nearly 2 kilometers away from the waterfall and is likewise not an accurate representation of the true height of Angel Falls as well. The Tugela River is an exceedingly small stream where it produces Tugela Falls, draining from a tiny basin at the very top of the Drakensberg which covers an area of approximately 3 square kilometers, but as the basin is entirely above 3,000 meters in elevation, it does receive snow fall in the winter months and rain during the wet season. The falls rarely flow with much force due to the small drainage area, and it is typically entirely dry during the summer months (without precipitation).Tugela is a phonetic spelling of the word "Thukela", meaning "sudden" or "startling". Indeed, this gentle stream makes a very abrupt leap off of a massive escarpment.