Sabbaday Falls

Author's Comments

The flume is the photograph. Everyone arrives at Sabbaday and starts at the bottom, working the wider lower drop, but the falls reveal themselves properly only when you climb the wooden stairs alongside and find yourself looking down into the narrow granite cut where the water has been working for longer than any of us can usefully imagine. The pothole is right there. You can see it. A perfect circle scoured into the rock by centuries of stones turning in the current. I prefer this place in late September, before the leaf peepers fully arrive on the Kancamagus but after the light has started to lengthen. Morning is the time. The flume sits in deep shade until mid-day, which sounds like a problem and is actually the gift - long exposures become possible without filters, and the water goes silk against the dark wet granite. A wide lens earns its keep here because the platforms put you close. Closer than you expect. Bring a polarizer. The wet rock will read as glare without one, and the moss on the flume walls is worth seeing in its actual color, which is a green I do not have a good word for. Spring runoff makes the falls louder and more dramatic but also blows out the detail in the upper drops. I like them better in their quieter mood, when you can see the architecture of the stone underneath. The trail is easy enough that you will share it. Come early and you will have twenty minutes alone before the families arrive, and twenty minutes is enough.

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