Descriptions of the gorge that Cascade Creek has carved into the bedrock north of Durango always include poetic adjectives like gorgeous and stunning. And because leaping into the narrows and jumping from pool to pool has become a notoriously popular adventure, words like risk and danger are also apropos, though often ignored.
A better way to think of Cascade Creek may be found in legal terminology, because the falls are akin to an “attractive nuisance,” to borrow a term from tort law. This doctrine holds that a landowner may be liable for injuries to a child, even if the child is trespassing, if that child is lured by an attractive nuisance, such as a trampoline. We are not trying to assign liability for the misadventures of people who have had to be rescued from the gorge this summer, or the death of one who drowned. Rather, we’re using the analogy to make a point: Cascade Creek is downright dangerous.
The spot is not on national forest land. It is on private land. People heading in to hop the falls are not welcome; they are trespassers. But seduced by the landscape, the sense of adventure and the lure of bragging rights, visitors tend to be child-like in their ability to assess the risks. The walls of the gorge are smooth as museum marble, and just as slick when wet. The water is always cold and the pools littered with branches, even tree trunks, washed into the stream. Jumpers can’t see what waits around the next bend, and can’t change their minds; the only way out of the gorge is at its lower end, or clipped to a rescue rope.
This is especially true this year, as no water is being diverted into the flume and pipeline that takes Cascade water to Electra Lake. The pipeline is under repair and that project may take all summer. That leaves much more water in the creek, and turns the gorge from an adventure to a deathtrap.
It also leaves one most appropriate word to describe the falls. This summer, and perhaps going forward, we should all consider Cascade Creek closed.
