Roaring to be seen

Second Waterfall Syndrome in Connecticut

One of the stranger sides of human behavior that I’ve observed as a travel writer is our collective incuriosity about venturing beyond superlative destinations. Take waterfalls. In most states, the tallest cascade is a landmark that commands seasonal audiences. It occupies seemingly limitless real estate on Instagram and TikTok. The competition for parking spaces, trail permits, and adjacent lodging grows each year. And yet, the masses keep chasing that one, big-ass waterfall; like a bunch of tipsy arisotracts on horses, hunting a fox on a British nobleman’s estate. Meanwhile, the second tallest waterfall in the state goes unseen and unappreciated, living in its sibling’s shadow.

This is Second Waterfall Syndrome, and it’s a sad situation for pretty much everyone involved. A really tall cascade isn’t necessarily going to be the most visually stunning cascade in the state. Dryad Fall, the tallest waterfall in New Hampshire, is a 300-foot monster when there’s a lot of snowmelt during spring. But during the summer and fall, Dryad dries up and becomes little more than a damp cliffside. Another drawback with chasing the tallest waterfall is the crowds themselves. When I visited Moxie Falls, the tallest waterfall in Maine, I found myself waiting in a small queue for the observation deck that overlooks the falls. And when I finally got there, I was less captivated by the waterfall itself and more terrified for the teens who were swimming in the dark pool beneath it, paddling closer and closer to the gigantic plume of water spilling into the pool, which was torrential and powerful enough to have drowned a moose. Second Tallest Waterfalls can sometimes offer an experience that more closely resembles what we imagine when we hit the road searching for a king-sized cascade. And back in early June, I decided to seek the towering, elusive #2 waterfall in the Nutmeg State.

Roaring Brook Falls, an 80-foot beauty nestled in the woods north of New Haven, is eclipsed by two superlative outdoor destinations. It’s a 15-minute drive from Sleeping Giant: Connecticut’s legendary traprock mountain. And on the waterfall height scale, it’s edged out by Kent Falls, in the remote northwest corner of the state. The key word there, however, is remote. What drew me to Roaring Brook Falls was its proximity to a major population center *and* the fact that getting to the cascade actually requires a hike. (Kent Falls is essentially a roadside attraction that you can see directly from the parking lot.) Plus, the specific location of Roaring Brook Falls added another layer of intrigue. While the falls are fairly close to protected green spaces like the Naugatuck State Forest, the actual waterfall rumbles away in a patch of forest that abuts a little suburban community called Cheshire. When I turned left onto the promisingly-named Roaring Brook Road to reach the trailhead, I found myself driving down a winding lane of McMansions and palatial lawns that looked like a part of the town in Blue Velvet.

“Really?” I thought to myself. “The second tallest waterfall in Connecticut is here…?”

But I was wrong to let doubt creep in. At the end of the curved road, a little dugout for parking and a trail information kiosk confirmed that I had reached the gateway to the falls for which the road was named! The gateway itself was literal—a chain link gate with a little space for hikers to dart around it. And the reason why I’d imagine it was placed here is because the trail to Roaring Brook Falls is actually a decomissioned road: a lost extension of the road I had driven down. I followed it into a lush corridor of deciduous forest, passing a buzzing pond on my right and a backyard on my left, where some PRIVATE PROPERTY signs were affixed to trees. The buzzing was a dark omen for things to come. The moment I entered the full heft of the woods, I found myself besieged by not just black flies, but also, deer flies. AKA, the tan shitgoblins that aim for your head. Thankfully I had a brand new bug net to break in, and it gave me a self-satisfied grin to see and hear the deer flies struggling to get through the mesh to my scalp and failing. I was wearing short-shorts and a skimpy tank top, and somehow, the flies never thought to aim for my exposed arms, chest, or legs instead.

The hike to Roaring Brook Falls is a short one: a 1.5-mile loop that showcases the danger of thinking about distance as a barometer for rigor. Because once you hit a two-way junction, the hike turns into a climb that’s surprisingly muscular for a path nestled in the backwaters of a tony suburb. I went to the right, after reading a couple of AllTrails reviews of the trail which had indicated that this was the steeper passage to the falls. With each year, I become even more intimidated by picking my way down very steep, rooty, and rocky terrain. And those AllTrails reviewers weren’t exaggerating. Within minutes of leaving the junction behind, the trail tilted upward at an angle that had my calves screaming and my bug net coated with beads of sweat. At one point, as I was breathing hard, the mesh of the bug net prevented me from inhaling one of the deer flies! (I swear, I’m not being paid by a bug net manufaturer to write this; I’m just a fan.) But the curious thing about this ascent was how the trail still resembled a forgotten road. Even as it became more gravelly and chunky, there were raggedy slabs of asphalt in the mix. Could this hillside have been a part of residential Cheshire at one point? To paraphrase Nathaniel Hawthorne, neighborhoods are always rising and falling in America. When you’re in Pittsburgh, climbing the city staircases, you climb through pockets of woodland that contain ruins of lost communities: stuff like old sidewalk segments, street lamp foundations, or—nightmarishly—open mine shafts.

The question of how the punishing and angular road to Roaring Brook Falls became a hiking trail is even more intriguing when you consider the grand scale and allure of the cascade itself. Did the earlier residents of Cheshire pile into their jalopies after killing a few beers and motor up the hillside to lay eyes on the big waterfall? Did they reduce their brake pads to nubbin during the descent? Was the road taken out of service after too many crashes? I have no idea when or why this old road stopped being a road, but sometimes the internal process of writing speculative fan fiction about the landscape through which you’re hiking is more satisfying than tracing the etiology of something interesting that you find amid that landscape. For instance, when you hike to Diana’s Baths in the White Mountains via the lesser-known “backdoor” route that I wrote about last summer, you come across the rusting skeleton of an actual jalopy that appears to have been manufactured during the New Deal era. And I’ve never bothered to dig into the question of how it ended up in the forest. The story I’ve written in my head is fine.

But as I approached Roaring Brook Falls, I didn’t have as much time to develop events and characters in my imagined narrative about the road. Because once the trail levels out, rewarding you with a partial glimpse of the valley below, the sound of whooshing water becomes very audible. After crossing Roaring Brook itself on a wooden bridge, I veered left to begin the second half of the loop and I followed the brook as it started sloshing downhill through the woods. So it begins, I thought, as the first array of pithy cascades materialized. And then, as the trail surmounted a bluff, the brook swung left and temporarily disappeared from sight. As I descended the bluff on the other side, at a steeper grade, the brook reappeared through the trees to my left, having rapidly and explosively transformed into a hall-of-fame gusher. It was a cascade of many shapes, with plunge and horsetail formations. The waterfall spilled into a ravine and the trail skirted the upper ledge of this ravine, with a couple of obvious lookout points where you can admire the height and power of Roaring Brook Falls. At one of the overlooks, I was able to observe the falls through a large hole in the trees that were sprouting up from within the ravine. The foliage of those trees could have easily obscured the falls from sight, and I assumed that someone must have cut some of the branches not too long ago. Once again, this quiet, leafy part of Cheshire offered a mystery to chew on.

But that’s the beauty of Second Tallest Waterfalls. There’s always some audience that appreciates these marginalized monsters. And often, it’s a local audience that’s more intimately acquainted with the landscape. Unlike my first visit to Kent Falls, a state park that very much feels like a tourist attraction, venturing into the forest to gawk at Roaring Brook Falls felt like sneaking into someone’s backyard. Hell, these falls may have been part of a former land owner’s backyard, back when the access road was being used by vehicles. Today, nothing about the surrounding landscape here would shout “Giant Waterfall Hike Nearby!” And yet, Roaring Brook Falls rumbles away in solitude. For majesty and ambience, there’s no better cascade in the Nutmeg State.

Roaring Brook Falls loop hike
Hike distance: 1.5 miles loop
Elevation gain: 426 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map

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Something weird is happening out in Nevada. Mirrored monolith sculptures have been appearing in the backcountry, and the latest one was found on a hiking trail near Las Vegas. Naturally, rumors abound. Are these monoliths the handiwork of aliens? Are they part of some government experiment to open portals into other dimensions? Or are they a practical joke, staged in these locations by pranksters who knew full well that they would inspire conspiracy theories? The third option is the most intriguing to me; mostly because I think outdoor pranking is underrealized these days. Remember those r/no sleep Reddit threads in which park rangers attested to being warned by their superiors about staircases that would appear in the woods at night? And how they were explicitly told to never go near those staircases? Part of me has wanted to schlep some construction materials into the White Mountain National Forest after dark and build one of those staircases. If anyone wants to help, shoot me an email.