Great guffawing gushers

The annual thawing of New England's cascades

So a few weeks ago, when I wrote about how you can embark on an epic waterfall crawl across the Maine woods this summer, I realized that this was kind of a cruel tease. We’ve officially reached early spring, when every inch of the New England landscape is thawing, dripping, and coming back to life. If there’s ever a moment to run off to the countryside in search of waterfalls at their most voluminous and thunderous, it’s now. So this week, I thought we should visit some of the great, guffawing gushers of New England cascades.

Why “guffawing?” Because during the summer and fall, a lot of the waterfalls in New England are more understated. One might say they’re chuckling, as a modest current of water spills over a precipice and trickles down parched rock faces into a pool that’s barely half full. Waterfalls in springtime are totally different animals. They explode through the forest; a frothing mass of water that’s often carrying branches, dead trees, and other woodland detritus. You wouldn’t cool your feet in the water at the base of a spring cascade, but you would stare at it in amused wonderment.

Anyway, my mission here is to leave you with enough doorways for getting out there and taking in some thawed cascades before the locals aquifers and water sources start to calm down. So just like last week’s primer on eclipse viewing sites that you can hike to, we’re going regional once again, with six waterfalls whose intensity really tends to wax and wane from spring to summer. In other words, to witness these waterfalls now is to see them in their full-fledged spritizing and misting glory.