Inglis Falls

We've already had a great day on our ongoing drive home, but we've still got two more waterfalls to stop at on the way.  Water levels are so high we just had to stop in and see them.
 

 

And we were right!  Inglis Falls was thundering like we had never seen before, and I've been stopping by here for decades.  When you got out of the car (above the falls, on the right in this picture) you could feel the spray on your face, something I've never experienced here.  I've clambered over the rocks below the falls when it's much drier, so this amount of water was spectacular to see.
 

 

A close comparison with a photo taken a year ago in the summer will show you the huge difference.  Note the shape of the waterfall here and then check it against the photo below, which is a normal mid-summer low flow level.

At low water levels you can clamber all over the waterfall, and some people do.  Look closely and you'll see someone right near the brink of the falls.

I prefer taking waterfall pictures at a slower speed, but I didn't have my tripod, and it was drizzling a bit, so I had trouble getting the right light settings for what I wanted.  This picture was the best I managed - I'll just have to come back sometime, that's all.

The amount of water charging down the gorge below the falls was perhaps even more surprising than the falls itself.  In mid summer you can cross this channel in the middle of the picture fairly easily.  The view in the distance is over Owen Sound, a town surrounded by the Niagara Escarpment.

Just for fun, I love this view of the Sydenham River as it reaches the brink of the falls.  You can barely see it, but on the left behind the trees is the large old pipe that carried water over and down to the various mills that stood here in the past.

And looking upstream from the same spot you see the mill dam; behind it is a substantial mill pond.  Several generations of my family lived a few kilometres from here, pioneering on a farm near Kilsyth.  I'm told that my great-grandfather brought his grain to the Inglis Mill to get it ground into flour.

Perhaps these were the very millstones which ground his grain!  A small remnant of the old gristmill can still be seen below the falls.  Both gristmills and sawmills operated here for 100 years, ending in 1945.