coffee county waterfalls

started a mini-vacation today, and the bike is out of commission until my tank liner arrives in the mail; so to take my mind off that i decided to hunt me up some waterfalls. damn good decision, coffee county is crawling with em, and it only takes an hour to get there. started with one i'd never heard of but is damn near one of my favourites now; rutledge falls. freaking incredible, it's on an old gigantic farmhouse's land, they allow folks to visit the falls, but don't want you on any of the rest of the property. damn fine of em cause this place is beautiful. you cut up through the woods and as you come out on the bluffs, the second thing you see(besides the falls) is an old beautiful metal statue mounted on the cliffs. at first i assumed it was a virgin mary, but was actually just a well done old school partial nude. she added alot to the eerie awesome feel to the place already, but when you climb down to the riverbed below the falls the temp drops like 15-20 degrees; killer natural a/c. and the water is absolutely freezing; it's on the highland rim but not on the plateau, but damn it was cold as swimming in grundy county. only ducked under once, ball crawling cold...could not stand to go below waist deep after. waded out to the falls and took some shots, smoked and drank a little coffee, had the place to myself for a good 40 minutes, and then the bikers who showed up only stayed 10 minutes, but i had already packed up, so headed on down the highway to machine gun falls.

these falls are in the short springs nature preserve, and are about 1.5 mile hike out and down, pretty damn steep. but so worth it, the photos don't do it justice; just can't convey the sheer drippy mossness of it all, nor the cacophony of the water; thus machine gun falls, according to a local i met up on the top part of the trail. it's listed as machine falls here on the internets, but he said everybody round there knows it as machine gun. not deep enough for swimming, but definitely can get up in there for a shower, and theres a deep enough sitting pool underneath the lower falls. had this place to myself for good hour, got a shower, came out and dried off and ate some lunch,but got hot enough to take another. the falls aren't big enough to churn up enough mist to cool it off much, and had more direct sunlight. but damn good spot, definitely be going back to both the first two...

third and fourth(big falls & blue hole), not so much. idk, if i had not been spent already(it was a hot sweaty climb back out of short springs) they may have been prettier if i felt like hiking down underneath em, but the falls at old stone fort were lackluster after the first 2. so i didn't really get any good shots of the bigger falls there, just this cool little trickle shelf. plus the ranger told me that the water has fecal coliform so didn't really want to do any wading. but i did hike out to em, maybe half mile, 3/4's. they are nice, but a waterfall i can't get in just holds little of my attention span. so i only hung around for 30 minutes or so and split. good day, pretty damn good motorcycle ride substitute.