For more than a decade the family on top of this mountain had no idea what was hiding at the bottom of the hill.
Here's a thing that'll tickle you, friend. The family that owned this mountain didn't know what they owned.
Back in the eighteen fifties, Colonel Ricketts's father and uncle bought themselves about five thousand acres of North Mountain, for the timber, same as everybody else. There was a stone house up top, by the lake the family would come to call Ganoga, miles of rough woods above where you're walking right now. They hunted that country. They fished it. They knew every bend of the lake. And for better than ten years, not one soul in that family had the first idea that two canyons full of waterfalls were sitting down the hill from their front door.
Then, around eighteen sixty-five, with the war just over, a couple of guests at that stone house went out fishing. History didn't keep their names, and that's a shame. They followed Kitchen Creek the way a fisherman will. One more pool. One more bend. They kept going down, well past where any sensible man would've turned around. And the creek started to drop. Then it dropped some more. And somewhere in there, those two men came around the rocks and stood looking at something nobody in that house had ever laid eyes on.
Now, I won't tell you they were the first. People walked these mountains for thousands of years before any fishing party, and I don't doubt some of them knew exactly where this water went. Call it found by folks who'd never thought to look.
But think how it hit that house. Young Bruce Ricketts had just come home from the worst war this country ever fought. And here come two fishermen to the supper table with wet boots and a story. I like to picture that supper, the pair of them trying to describe it, and the whole table figuring they'd been into the whiskey.
Somebody went down to see for himself. And that was the end of it, whether he knew it or not. Every step you're about to climb, every name on every falls, every old tree left standing, goes back to two men who wouldn't turn around at a bend in a creek. I'd have bought those fellows a drink. I'd still like to know their names.
Listen up ahead, under the sound of the creek. That low sound coming in. That's what they heard.
Photo: Ganoga_Lake_-_Lakeside_Evening.jpg: ben.kouba derivative work: Ruhrfisch (talk) · CC BY 2.0
