Another 24 hour adventure in the books! This was an exhausting 24 hours for sure this trip but it ended beautifully. I had a couple meetings near Sandusky, Ohio for work which led us to driving all night to the border of Ohio. The trip on the way to Sandusky only took about 3.5 hours avoiding tolls. After completing my meetings, we couldn’t think of a better way to take advantage of the trip than to go see a waterfall! We decided to stop at a place called Cascade Park in Elyria, Ohio. It only took about a half hour from Sandusky, Ohio.
Getting to Cascade Park
Cascade Park has recently been renovated and a new road down to the park has been built. For this reason if you just put Cascade Park into Google Maps it will take you to a weird back street. Instead put these GPS coordinates in: 41.377143, -82.111278. This is the new entrance to the park. Take this entrance down the hill and you’ll find a large parking lot. The trail the we took is to the far right of the parking lot if you are looking at the river.
Exploring Cascade Park
When you first get to the park, it looks like just a normal park with swings, slides, and a jungle gym but little did we know that there was a 35 foot high, 80 feet wide waterfall at the end of the trail. To our understanding, there is actually two high waterfalls at this park but we were so exhausted we only got to explore one. The first and only falls that we got to experience was called the West Falls of the Black River. To get here, park at Cascade Park’s main lot near the playground. There was plenty of parking if you are nervous about getting there super early or worried about spaces at the park. If you head upstream towards the big rocks, which were beautiful alone, you will be on the right track. Here the park’s 1.5 mile loop trail starts. According to the map posted, the walk is about 1.3 miles long and either trail you follow will loop to these falls.
We did get some good shots before we got to the waterfall of some of the water surrounding the park and the fallen rocks. One thing we were a bit astonished with was the fact that the park was very vandalized. What I mean is that there was graffiti, profanity, garbage everywhere, and glass shards everywhere. Sadly there is a lot of garbage in the gorge below the falls as well, such as tires, oil drums and the bits and pieces of garbage. We even saw an old baby car seat. It was almost sad down by the falls. There is a little trail right before the old bridge that is now closed on the way to the overlook that you can get down into the gorge of the falls, which is where we got most of our images but where most of the garbage was. I would highly recommend boots down by the falls due to the glass.
Once we were completed taking some shots and spending some time near the bottom of the falls, we decided to hike back up the hill to the overlook. Now there is a bridge above the falls which leads into Downtown Elyria, which you can view the falls from above but we went to the overlook created by the park. The overlook was more appealing due to not being able to see the rubbish below. The mist and roaring water was very eye catching from this angle. It was almost comforting where Kayla almost fell asleep standing up on the railing (which could have been from the long drive and working too). We got some great shots from this angle and the trail seems pretty accessible. We didn’t see many people on the trail, maybe one or two people max.
Overall, the waterfall was beautiful, big and worth the little detour in our trip. We were so exhausted that once we got into the car, home was where our next adventure had to be. It took about 4.5 hours to get to Pittsburgh due to a pitstop we needed to completed to go pick up our puppy, Lily from West Virginia. We also stopped to get dinner from a place called Uncle Bo’s Slow-N-Low BBQ in Elyria. It was so delicious!! Was one of the best BBQ places we have ever eaten and I’m from South Carolina! We can’t wait to go back!
Cascade Park Photo Gallery
