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Dupont Falls, the falls are located at the end of Thane Road. The cache is within the first 10 minutes from the trailhead. There is a nearby cache (GC97J)
Name: Point Bishop/Dupont Trail (Easy)
Distance: 8 miles (Pt. Bishop)/1.6 miles (Dupont)
Location: Thane Road
Elevation change: 200 feet
Access: 5.5 miles south of downtown Juneau at end of Thane Road
Brown and black bears occasionally roam here; many hikers carry bells or whistles to make their presence known. Juneau gets an average of 92 inches of rain a year. Carry rain gear and prepare for slick, muddy trails. If you do slip on a trail, watch out for the aptly named devil's club; the plant's spine-ridden stalks look like the perfect means of steadying yourself--a mistake you won't repeat.
Hiking in Juneau, Alaska. There are hundreds of trails in Juneau. Some are a relaxing walk at sea level. Others include a comfortable 3 hour hike up the trails around the world-famous Mendenhall Glacier, or a vigorous hike to the top of one of our many mountains. Most are in the rainforest with lots of flora and fauna.
Levels of Difficulty
Easy:
A hike without much elevation gain; no previous hiking experience is needed.
Moderate:
A hike that has some elevation gain; a good follow-up from easy hikes and a good lead up to rugged hikes.
Difficult:
A hike that has much elevation gain; previous hiking experience is needed.
Very Difficult:
Usually a very steep trail; advanced hikers only, please
The Dupont trails waterfalls empty into Glacier Bay which surrounds the town of Juneau, Alaska. As you walk along the trails of Juneau to include Dupont trail, you can see evidence of the rock formations that have evolved into the surrounding rain forests.
The marine wilderness of Dupontn Trail and other trails in Juneau include tidewater glaciers, snow-capped mountain ranges, ocean coastlines, and freshwater rivers and lakes. This diverse land and seascape hosts a mosaic of plant communities and a variety of marine and terrestrial wildlife and presents many opportunities for adventuring and learning about this unique and powerful place.
The Glacier Bay region's extreme topography reveals that it is a landscape driven by immense energies. This is a result of the area's position astride the active collision zone between the North American and Pacific plates. For over 100 million years, North America has been plowing obliquely into the Pacific plate, presently at a rate of several centimeters per year or about the speed at which your fingernails grow. Generally, during this collision, the Pacific plate has been forced under the North America plate, but occasional “bits” such as island arcs, pieces of sea floor, fragments of continental margin have been scraped off one plate or the other, shattered, and smeared along the leading edge of North American plate. These geologic bits are called “terranes.” Four such terranes have accumulated in a largely northwest-southeast pattern to form the Glacier Bay.
At the present time, the outboard-most terrane and the present continental margin are still “closing the gap.” Frequent earthquakes dramatically illustrate that plate motion continues. As these two plates are forced against each other, the compression has pushed some rocks upward to form mountain chains. Others are forced downward and melted in the process. Molten rock then oozes volcanically through the shattered landscape. When it cools, it welds together one of the world's most complex geological jigsaw puzzles: Glacier Bay.
Juneau, Alaska's third largest city and capital has the most extensive trail system in all of Southeast. The land that is formed around Juneau is because glacier bay.
Southeast Alaska offers scenery like no other imaginable place. Juneau is located in the heart of the Tongass National Forest, the largest national forest in the country at nearly 17 million square miles. Though Juneau is part of the main continent, it is separated by thousands of miles of rock and ice, essentially functioning like an island. No roads connect to Juneau and visitors must enter town by boat or plane. Steep mountains which jet right out of the Gastineau Channel will take your breath away. The landscape is still being carved by glaciers and with over 235 days of precipitation a year Juneau displays a lush green rainforest along its coastlines and glaciers.
The Tongass National Forest is home to about 75,000 people who are dependent on the land for their livelihoods. Several Alaska Native tribes live throughout Southeast Alaska such as the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian. 31 communities are located within the forest; the largest is Juneau, the state capital, with a population of 31,000. The forest is named for the Tongass group of the Tlingit people, who inhabited the southernmost areas of the Alaska panhandle near what is now Ketchikan. Along with British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest, Tongass is part of the "perhumid rainforest zone," and the forest is primarily made up of western red cedar, sitka spruce, and western hemlock. Tongass is Earth's largest remaining temperate rainforest. Unique and protected features seldom found anywhere else in North America inhabit the thousands of islands along the Alaska coast. Though its land area is huge, two thirds of the Tongass is not actually forest, but snow, ice, rock, and non-forest vegetation. The terrain underlying Tongass is divided between Karst (limestone rock, well-drained soil, and many caves), and Granite (poorly-drained soil).
Features
•Water defines the Tongass National Forest, from glacial melt to rain and snow, water impacts geology, soils, plant and animal tolerances and limits, migrations and seasonal fluctuations.
•16.9 million acres of public land and over 2000 islands and adjacent coastline from the southern tip of Prince of Wales Island 500 miles north to Hubbard Glacier north of Yakutat is within the Tongass National Forest. This is ninety percent of the southeastern panhandle of Alaska.
•Geologic and climatic variation within short distances of less than 1600 feet are so dramatic that vegetation and wildlife are distinctly zonated and adapted to rainfall and temperature extremes.
•Maritime and coastline adaptations are found in all life forms, including algae, fungi, lichens, mosses, bog and muskeg plants and animals, vast anadramous and non-anadramous fisheries, and high and low altitude dwelling animals and plants.
•Forests of hemlock, spruce, red and yellow cedar dominate the canopy of the temperate rainforest. In areas protected from salt laden winds, trees may live to be more than 500 years old. Approximately 83 percent of the old growth forests remain as they were 100 years ago, before commercial logging began.
•Half of the Tongass landforms include ice, water, muskeg (a form of acidic bog) and rock. 11,000 miles of shoreline within the Forest are formed from mountains reaching down slope to sea level, and glacial rivers of ice either perch above sea level or reach sea level as tidewater glaciers.
•Designated wilderness areas and two National Monuments comprise 35 percent of the Tongass National Forest, representing the highest percentage of any forest in the national forest system.
•Containing the largest concentration of caves and karst (calcium carbonate dominated geology) landscapes in Alaska, the Tongass examples are truly world class. These complex ecosystems are of geological, paleohydrological, paleontological, and archaeological significance, and add significantly to our understanding of natural and cultural resources of Prince of Wales Island.
•Habitats that support large populations of coastal grizzly bears, Alexander Archipelago wolves, mountain goats, and streams and waters that support five species of salmon occur on the Tongass National Forest.
•The Tongass is the home for many cultures and many peoples, from Alaska Native villages of Tlingit and Haida tribes and the Annette Island Reservation of Tshimshian tribes, to Euroamerican descendants of gold seekers, loggers, or commercial fishing. These multicultural communities continue today. Embedded in the Tongass National Forest, with the added dimension of ecotourism, and with statehood, politics added to the mix of rural economies.
A waterfall is usually a geological formation resulting from water, often in the form of a stream, flowing over an erosion-resistant rock formation that forms a sudden break in elevation or nick point.
Some waterfalls form in mountain environments where the erosive water force is high and stream courses may be subject to sudden and catastrophic change. In such cases, the waterfall may not be the end product of many years of water action over a region, but rather the result of relatively sudden geological processes such as landslides, faults or volcanic action.
Typically, a river flows over a large step in the rocks which may have been formed by a fault line. Over a period of years, the edges of this shelf will gradually break away and the waterfall will steadily retreat upstream, creating a gorge of recession. Often, the rock stratum just below the more resistant shelf will be of a softer type, meaning undercutting, due to splash back, will occur here to form a shallow cave-like formation known as a rock shelter or plunge pool under and behind the waterfall. Eventually, the outcropping, more resistant cap rock will collapse under pressure to add blocks of rock to the base of the waterfall. These blocks of rock are then broken down into smaller boulders by attrition as they collide with each other, and they also erode the base of the waterfall by abrasion, creating a deep plunge pool.
Streams become wider shallow just above waterfalls due to flowing over the rock shelf, and there is usually a deep pool just below the waterfall because of the kinetic energy of the water hitting the bottom.
Waterfalls can occur along the edge of glacial trough, whereby a stream or river flowing into a glacier continues to flow into a valley after the glacier has receded or melted. The large waterfalls in Yosemite Valley are examples of this phenomenon. The rivers are flowing from hanging valleys.
Types of Waterfalls...
Block: Water descends from a relatively wide stream or river.
Cascade: Water descends a series of rock steps.
Cataract: A large waterfall.
Fan: Water spreads horizontally as it descends while remaining in contact with bedrock.
Horsetail: Descending water maintains some contact with bedrock.
Plunge: Water descends vertically, losing contact with the bedrock surface.
Punchbowl: Water descends in a constricted form, and then spreads out in a wider pool.
Segmented: Distinctly separate flows of water form as it descends.
Tiered: Water drops in a series of distinct steps or falls.
Multi-Step: A series of waterfalls one after another of roughly the same size each with its own sunken plunge pool.
To get credit for this cache e-mail chiefsfan19 the answer to the following questions:
1) Post a picture of your party near the falls.(optional)
2) Approximately how high are the falls?
3) Approximately how wide are the falls?
4) What type of Waterfall?
5) What type of rock is the waterfall formed from?
Additional Hints
(No hints available.)