Day 4: Mossbrae Falls

Today we took a little hike that I found in my web research before our trip.  There's a very pretty waterfall in the town of Dunsmuir, and the only way to get there is to park on the edge of town, in a residential area, next to the train tracks, and then walk along the tracks for about an hour to the falls.  The scenery was just beautiful.  We ended up spending the whole afternoon at the falls, relaxing and reading, and in all that time we only saw 2 other people.  Though it was kind of funny, we were surrounded by this gorgeous scenery, and for the first half-hour of our walk we were passing construction crews doing major work on the train tracks.  At first I thought they might not be happy with us being there, there wasn't much space next to the tracks so sometimes we even had to step over their equipment to get through, but they just waved and smiled.  At least we didn't have to worry about trains coming through (though I did have some idle thoughts about how incredibly detailed their procedures must be for handling work like this, to make sure there's absolutely no way a miscommunication somewhere could result in a train running into the construction).

Here's one of the construction trucks:

You can just barely see a rainbow in the falls in the next two pictures:

On our way back, we did encounter two trains.  It was a little scary, we were only able to move off to the side of the tracks about 10 feet.  We were on the edge of a drop-off going down to the river, so we actually sat down to feel safer.  But the train wasn't moving too fast, maybe 30 MPH, so it wasn't too bad, and the engineer even waved to us.