Last weekend Liz & I went camping at Worthington State Forest near the Deleware Water Gap in north-western NJ. I’ll write more about Worthington in another post, here I wanted to tell you about Dingmans Falls, which we visited while we were up there. I wasn’t too familiar with the Water Gap before going up there this time, and had only ever heard of Bushkill Falls. Turns out that Bushkill isn’t actually part of the NPS systems, and you have to pay a private owner a fee to go there. We were kind of short on funds, and the helpful ranger at the Kittatinny Point Visitor Center told us there are plenty of other waterfalls to see that are in the Deleware Water Gap NRA. We were going to go see Dingmans Falls & Raymondskill Falls, but we never made it to Raymondskill.

After turning off US 209, we found a small water feature downstream of Dingmans Falls, along the approach road to the visitor’s center. It is a nice little area, with a clearing to park on both sides of the approach road, and a trail along the stream.

The visitor’s center is less than a minute further down the approach road after we stopped at the water feature. It is a nice place with a lot of interesting information and exhibits. For anyone who has a passport, they have a cancellation stamp there.

The Falls are up a flat boardwalk trail, about a 1/4 mile to the base of the falls. Along the way we found another smaller water fall, called Silver Thread Falls. With a vertical drop of 80ft, it is a bit smaller than Dingmans Falls, but it was a nice surprise along the walk.

Shortly after Silver Thread Falls we came to the base of Dingmans Falls.

With a vertical drop of 130ft, it is a fairly impressive waterfall.

There is a set of stairs, which start practically behind me when taking the photo above, that lead to the head of the waterfall. They work their way around the left side of the photo, and eventually to the ledge on the left side of the falls in upper part of the photo. It was a bit of a work out, but I nice view from the top.

Tags: hiking, outdoor

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 5:35 pm and is filed under hiking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.