Valley Falls State Park near Fairmont in West Virginia is one of those hidden gem locations in the Almost Heaven State! Confusingly located off Route 310 south of Fairmont, it is often quiet and peaceful – except when the Tygart river is running high, when it turns into a raging torrent of water flowing over the two main cascades.
Although I have been here quite a few times, including one lovely fall morning where I captured some of my favorite images of the view here, I didn’t know much about the history of the park. This time, I investigated a little more and found this on the WV State Park website:
During the 1830s, a trader acquired what is now Valley Falls State Park and built a lumber mill which was later followed in 1847 by a grist mill. With the completion of the Baltimore & Ohio railroad line, from Grafton to Wheeling, in 1853, the community began to boom, with a ferry, post office, shops, a factory and schools. A fire in 1886, followed by floods two years later, destroyed much of the town. In 1964, the West Virginia state park system acquired the falls and surrounding land and created the Valley Falls State Park.
You can certainly imagine how this river could have wiped away the town – there is a lot of power in that water! This view above was one of my riskiest ventures (not physically for me, I must say!). This April morning was very quiet, I was the only one in the park and so I took my drone out for a flight. In reality, the noise from the water was so loud that no-one could have heard the drone anyway! I slowly descended until it was about 10 feet above the water surface just by this outcrop on the lower falls and took a panorama of images to capture the full scene. Certainly powerful!
The overall view of the falls can be seen from far above:
There is a lovely redbud tree in the lower left of this image – we will come back to that shortly!
Flying higher, I took a top-down view of the main falls:
We often think of drones giving us a high-level aerial view of a scene, sometimes losing the details as we take in the grandeur of a location. But this time I tried something a little different. That lovely redbud tree has a small wooden bench that is perfect for taking in the scene in front of us, but capturing both the tree, the bench and the falls is quite difficult. I decided to hover the drone about 10 feet above the ground and got this lovely view of the scene:
On a beautiful morning like this, it is hard to stop taking photographs. I decided to capture a few more around this famous overlook while the tree is in blossom:
And this one, overlooking the second set of falls on the Tygart river:
If you look very carefully across the river at this viewpoint, you might see a small waterfall cascading down the rocks. I’m not sure that is normally there, so I decided to try a different approach to it:
I thought this was a lovely contrast between the massive flows of water over the main falls, with the small, almost ethereal waterfall coming down the rock face. I think that small twig towards the bottom of the photo shows just how hard it must be to get a grip on these rocks when the river is at flood stage! For the technically minded, this was taken with a 1 second exposure the blur the flow of water over the rocks.
It is always interesting to capture flowing water. Often we use a long exposure of a second or two to smooth out the water, but if we go the other way to a very short exposure time, we see something very different.
This one is a close up of one of those smooth flows of water over the rock edge with an exposure of 1/4000th of a second. Suddenly, that smooth flow that our eyes see become almost like frozen ice as the water droplets cascade over the edge of the rocks.
And, finally, this one shows two of those cascades with an even shorter exposure of 1/6400th of a second. It looks like it has been turned into glass this time. Interesting, almost abstract views of water!
We did take an almost 4-mile round trip hike along the trail further downriver to see two other waterfalls in the area. Not only was this more than my knees could take, but it was also not all that impressive either! So, if you do visit Valley Falls, perhaps spend your time around the main park area!
