Upper Taughannock Falls

Taughannock Falls State Park is located on the west side of Cayuga Lake, about 8 miles north of the city of Ithaca. In downtown Ithaca, at the junction of Route 96 / 34 and 89, turn west onto Route 89 North. Continue approximately 8 miles on Route 89 to the park. Continue past the main parking lot for one-third of a mile, then turn left onto Taughannock Park Road, and continuing for another 1.4 miles to a junction with NY 143. Turn left, cross the bridge over Taughannock Creek, then immediately bear left into the gravel parking area next to the bridge. A trail leads shortly to the Black Diamond Trail, a decommissioned railroad grade. Turn left on the Black Diamond Trail and walk to the old trestle spanning the gorge of Taughannock Creek, where you can peer straight down 150 feet to the falls.Upper Taughannock Falls is fairly significant in stature, and especially unique in appearance, but like Lower Taughannock Falls at the entrance to the park it gets overshadowed and overlooked by its much larger downstream sibling. The Upper Falls marks the point where the creek plunges into Taughannock Gorge, which is considerably narrower here than at the larger falls downstream. The upper falls drop 58 feet where the creek transitions from sheeting across a broad smooth bedrock shelf, plunging over a small 3-foot ledge which is so uniform in appearance that it almost looks like a dam, and then quite literally funnels into a booming horsetail type fall, transitioning from a broader breadth at its top to a narrow plunge of water at its base. Because the falls are viewed from a bridge looking nearly straight down, it appears to be much taller than in actuality. One of the more interesting characteristics of Taughannock Creek is its tendency to run completely dry during the summer months, despite the creek upstream from the falls draining from a basin which covers an area of approximately 66 square miles. However, because of its large drainage basin, when summer rains do pass through, the stream does often come back to life, if even just temporarily. Precipitation that passes through from tropical storms that pass up the eastern seaboard will often result in significant volumes of rain, and in such cases Taughannock Creek can quite impressively go from dry to flood stage in a matter of hours. Though little stream flow data is available for Taughannock Creek specifically, a field measurement was made in September of 2004 with a flow of over 2,300 cubic feet per second in the creek as a result of the passing of the remnants of Hurricane Frances.