However, when I got to the other side of the river, I noticed that there was no trail and it was a straight bushwhack into the thickness of vegetation. Without pants, I realized that I probably…

Maybe all the bad decisions in pursuing this falls finally caught up with me and I had to respect the limits that Mother Nature threw at me. I even wondered if I saw the Grizzly Bear Falls at all…

It was unnerving to see this many people out here on a Friday, and I’d bet that on the weekends, it would be even worse. Maybe lots of people were already out of school…

In my mind, I was thinking that all the caution that we were practicing was essentially getting thrown to the wind the moment you start involving people who don’t take this seriously…

Regardless, by the time we were driving on Mt Baldy Road, we were seeing on multiple occasions flashing signs saying ‘All Baldy Trails Closed’ and ‘Parked Vehicles Will Be Towed Away’…

Julie was fearful that they might get reported to police so they stayed behind, but now that planted in my mind that perhaps there was a time limit for my exploration before the cops would show up…

Still, with all the mental stress from being stuck in the house and the uncertainty for how long COVID-19 was going to last in America, we were definitely getting cabin fever. Spring was usually…

Sure enough, when we got to the Bear Gulch Nature Center, given all the delays that Julie induced on the way here, it turned out that the car in front of us took the very last parking spot…

When they eventually showed up, we ultimately got started on our hike at about 10:20am. Surprisingly, our group actually consisted of about five different families, I think, with lots of kids…

Along the way, I saw quite a few more hikers going up to the falls, including one couple where one woman really looked like she struggled (making me wonder if she had brought enough water…

We even had to scramble and skirt by some slippery and eroded ledges or dropoffs (including one rope-assisted part) where Tahia got real nervous and even cried as she was starting to lose confidence..

Julie and I were hoping big time that it wouldn’t result in a really bad injury to one of them where we’d likely get blamed for bringing them to this hike in the first place should such a calamity…

However, some kids came out of a house and demanded money pretty aggressively. The oldest asked that we pay 10 Tala for taking pictures (seemed like she was making it up as she went), and we did…

..I was busy taking pictures before heading out, we noticed that Sophia slipped and fell into a shallow part of Willow Creek. Dad aggressively went into the creek after her when he, too, slipped…

Going down seemed to be every bit as treacherous as going up was hot and tiring. I really had to watch my step as I was going down, and my knees were feeling the aches and pains of receiving…

…the ferries returned to the dock, it looked like line 2 was moving first, then line 1. However, lines 6 and 7 didn’t move at all. When line 1 was done loading, the ferry took off without us!…

This wasn’t what the forecast had called for so I decided to wait out the squall. In the mean time, I was putting on waterproof pants and hiking boots inside the car (not a lot of room mind you)…

But with us apparently not going to be going onto this particular ferry, I was now wondering if we had made a mistake in relying on ferries as clearly we weren’t going to make it to Frederiksborg…

Actually, the scrambling up to the top of the falls wasn’t very trivial as I had to grip some sloping hard-rock surfaces that could easily be difficult to get a grip, especially if wet…

It didn’t even matter that some of them had the forest service pass on their dashboards or hanging from their rear-view mirror. The cops also got them for parking over the traffic lines so trying…