What is a waterfall, exactly? “It can be controversial,” Mark Oleg Ozboyd said the other day, in Rabun County, Georgia. “There are fifty different answers.” Ozboyd leans conservative when it comes to applying the designation. “A random cascade out in the woods is not a waterfall,” he said. “Neither is a little white water. Personally, I think it needs a ten-foot sheer vertical drop. If it’s more gradual, it should be at least twenty feet high.” He went on, “There are people, like my dad, who think a waterfall has to be thirty feet high. I disagree there, but I see where he’s coming from.”
Ozboyd is a waterfall wunderkind who has been chronicling waterfalls in Georgia since he was a homeschooled teen. At thirteen, he started a hiking blog. At seventeen, he compiled the Georgia Waterfall Database, which lists every qualifying cataract, and, soon afterward, began researching a book that he recently published. (He is now twenty-three.) “Waterfalls of Georgia” makes the case, Ozboyd said, “that Georgia is just as impressive a waterfall state as Pennsylvania, and not far off from North Carolina and New York. We’ll never be Hawaii or Washington, of course.” He added, “But Georgia should be known for its waterfalls, too.”
The book, full of Ozboyd’s splashy photography and descriptions, identifies seven hundred and thirty-five waterfalls across the Peach State, fourteen of which were “undocumented”—a more precise term than “undiscovered”—before he arrived. (Hunters and fishermen may have encountered them first.) The waterfaller’s tools: obscure blogs, Google Earth, lidar data (“a topographic map on steroids”), and hundreds of hikes with his dad, a chess master and accordion teacher from Belarus. Ozboyd also benefitted from the legwork of several other Georgia-waterfall mavens, including a physicist in his late eighties, a manager at a Publix grocery store, and a charismatic Christian pastor who says “Praise the Lord” every time he sees falling water. “He always chooses the craziest names,” Ozboyd said, of the pastor. “Like, ‘Breath Away Falls.’ ” Thanks to technology, Ozboyd added, “this is a golden age for waterfall discovery and documentation.”
Last year, a friend dubbed Ozboyd “Dr. Waterfall.” The doctor has a few advantages: he’s not allergic to poison ivy, and he likes driving. It took about fifteen thousand miles in his truck and another fifteen hundred miles on foot to reach all the falls. He created an Excel sheet noting ratings for hiking difficulty and waterfall beauty. He said, “The beauty ratings were harder to come up with than the difficulty ratings. I decided, I’ll have a few tens and a few fours.” Among the tens: Angelica Falls, in Rabun County, which he was the first to document. He named it after his mother.
On a recent Sunday, Dr. Waterfall, who is tall and bespectacled, took a few students bushwhacking to Cliff Creek Falls (beauty: nine; difficulty: eight), one of his finds, a hundred miles northeast of Atlanta. He invited along Ken Steinkamp, a customer-service manager at a steel company who moonlights as a waterfaller. “I think I’ve been to around a hundred,” Steinkamp said. He met Ozboyd through a waterfalling Facebook group. “I didn’t know how old he was at first,” Steinkamp, who is forty-three, admitted. “I was reading his stuff, showing it to my wife, like, ‘Wow, this guy is good.’ Then I found out he was fourteen.”
Steinkamp recalled one of their earliest adventures. “We dropped over the side of the highway railing,” he said. “People are driving by, probably thinking, like, What are these guys doing? We just disappeared.” “That was Spoilcane Falls,” Ozboyd remembered. “Beauty rating six, I think. Difficulty nine.” Steinkamp’s childhood, in Indiana, was basically waterfall-free.
The group trudged down a leaf-covered drainage, through oaks and pines, some of which had been toppled by Hurricane Helene, stopping to examine a possum skull. After a while, they arrived at a steep but manageable drop-off. Ozboyd was navigating from memory. “Moving through an off-trail landscape is like a chess game,” he said. “You have to know your next move.”
The waterfallers plunged downward. Eventually, they found the waterfall, whose essential waterfallness was clear. It made two nearly ninety-degree chuted turns, dropping forty feet into an emerald pool surrounded by rhododendrons and gneiss cliffs flecked with quartz. “Cliffs make any waterfall more interesting,” Ozboyd said. He rock-hopped around one side of the falls, climbed a hill, and disappeared into a damp-looking grotto. A companion pulled himself up the slippery rocks along the flank of the falls until he felt its spray. He took a deep breath. There was a technical term for what he was doing, Ozboyd told him, emerging from the cave: “You are being one with the waterfall.” ♦
Comments
Leave a Comment