Tennant Creek Falls Hike

It seemed like Sunday would be too nice a day to stay inside so we called our neice Emily, and scheduled ourselves a hike on the Tennant Creek Falls trail. Sunday dawned sunny and kind of cold, while we were hiking about 25 degrees but there wasn't a breeze so it really was perfect.

Emily's dad, Don (my 2nd brother) brought her to the house and we were on the road to the trailhead by 10am. The trail is in Hope Falls, not too far from where we live so it didn't take us long to get there. However, this is a seasonal use road and where the road turns from paved to dirt, was a temporary barrier. We parked there and it was about a mile hike into the trail head.

It was obvious from the boot and ski tracks that this is a popular location, even in winter. It took about 1/2 an hour to get to the actual trail head.
We signed in and started down the trail to the bridge where the Tennant Creek Falls trail takes a hard right and splits from the Wilcox Lake trail. We had carried our snow shoes to this point but it seemed obvious that with only a couple of inches of snow on the ground that snow shoes just weren't needed. While we were tying them onto our packs a guy and his dog blew by us, up the Tennent Creek Falls trail.

Anyway, snow shoes packed, we headed off. Tennant Creek had quite a bit of broken ice, due, I suspect to the warm rains we had a couple of weeks ago. Very pretty in the sunlight. The trail to the 1st (of 3) falls is just shy of a mile from the trail head and we got there a little before noon. We met the guy and dog again, leaving to go back to the trail head, just as we got there.

Normally, this is a pretty waterfall with a good sized pool at the bottom that lots of people come to play in during the summer months. This time of year it was frozen over tho we could see that the water was flowing pretty quickly under the ice.
We had lunch on a convenient fallen tree and then Randy got some pics of us and the falls. We thought we'd try and move on to the 2nd falls, about another mile or so from the first. While the trail to the 1st falls was pretty well used, the trail to the 2nd falls hadn't been used in a while. So, we decided not to go and turned around to go back.


We spent some time on the way back taking pictures, just as we did on the way up. It's hard to convey how pretty the stream is and the great ice formations we could see. However, I think some good pics were taken.
It was a good day out, expecially since we wanted to burn a few calories in preparation for the Super Bowl snack fest in store for the evening.