Waterfall Hike in Cochran Mill Park
- Lester Martin
Time for another peaceful, and relatively easy, hike in & around the Atlanta area. This outing took place at Cochran Mill Park, south of Atlanta.
As the map shows, this place has a LOT of trails!
The big hike is up to Henry Mill Falls (not a big waterfall) in the upper-left corner, but not the destination of this EASY day. As shown below, we stayed on the orange trails. I’ve marked it up a bit with some points discussed further in this posting.
After crossing the road near the parking lot you’ll feel yourself going downhill quick. Of course, it was already getting warm and I let my imagination think of when I’d be heading back up this steep hill at the end of the hike. I’m a up-then-down waterfall hiker myself.
Soon you see Cochran Mill Falls which is not too big, but would surely look awesome with some water volume running over it.
It has a nice little pool at the base for wadding in and if you’ll look below you just might find a troubling image of something that looks way out of place. Hint: the curly headed guy in the lower-right corner who has a machete or sword sheathed. WTH??
After crossing Little Bear Creek you take a left down a very nice and wide path with green everywhere you look.
A short walk on the trail makes has you feeling like Robert Front when you find this scenic fork in the road. We took the high road!
Not much further we found a bridge towering over Bear Creek which technically was the back entrance to the Bear Creek Nature Center. Pretty views for sure, but MORE hiking than was planned for today so we stayed on the orange trail system.
More hiking with the trail sloping on the left down to the creek.
Eventually, you’ll spy a nice slide waterfall on the left – maybe you’ll spy on some folks just enjoying it, too!
Here is the view from the top of it when you step off the trail.
Looking to the right you will notice a little damn that is slowly letting out the water from the small reservoir you can see on the map.
Walking down the slide you can see the water far below.
Halfway down revealed the carefree couple spied earlier from the trail.
And then the lower elements of the slide.
Selfie Time! I even got photo-bombed (actually, bad framing on my part it seems; haha).
Time to get moving and yep, you guessed it… MORE trails. It is a very lush trail system and I really enjoyed all the trees.
Eventually you loop back to the original falls and the walking bridge just downstream.
And, of course, one last pic of Cochran Mill Falls!