Monte Sano State Park in Alabama, not far from Huntsville, is interesting for those of us that enjoy the struggle to find a waterfall. So I show up at the park to camp for a few days with other adventures planned nearby, but of course my priority is to find a pair of waterfalls that were listed in a book I’d purchased previously. The falls were called Lodge Falls and McKay Hollow Falls in the book. Now here’s what I experienced at Monte Sano – they don’t advertise their waterfalls. If you didn’t come there knowing they exist, you might be distracted by other features of the park and have no idea. To that end let me explain how to find these.
McKay Hollow Falls is the easier of the two falls to find, and you may stumble across it if you’re there to do some decent hiking. Monte Sano has a bunch of hiking trails of different length and skill level, which makes it a great hiking park for the record. One of the more awesome and longer trails there is the McKay Hollow Trail. A casual hiker enjoying this trail would incidentally find the falls of the same name. But you don’t even have to hike it, you just have to go to where McKay Hollow Trail intersects the North Plateau Loop on the map, by a picnic area. One of the McKay Hollow Trail’s terminus is there, and as soon as you start the trail or are about to exit the trail, you find McKay Hollow Falls plunging over the side of the picnic area next to the trail.
Lodge Falls, and keep in mind this name just comes from some book I bought, as I can’t find official documentation anywhere otherwise, probably was nicknamed as such because it isn’t far from the park’s lodge. For starters if you’ve already identified where McKay Hollow Falls is, then you’re not far. The lodge is a little walk to the East down the North Plateau Loop from McKay. Keep following the North Plateau Loop barely past the lodge and the trail will dip into a creek bed. I was last there in winter, and it had a decent flow in it. We’re talking nearly in visual range of the lodge still. The creek bed appears to flow down some rocks and not be a big deal. But it is a big deal. Crawl/climb down the creek bed for just a few minutes and what is just out of site is a really cool fall that there’s no indication of anywhere on a park map, although I can see on a current park map there is indication of the creek. No trails run here. They’d have to build a safe viewing platform if it was a mainstream thing to visit in the park, because this gets sketchy. Anyway you’ll be rewarded with a plunge type fall with a bowl basin, and some exciting scrambling up and down a steep cliff. So to recap to find this thing for those of you holding a park map, you’ll be on the North Plateau Loop, between the Lodge and the Fire Tower Trail. Follow the water downstream.
Falls aside Monte Sano made for a decent campground experience. Being on a mountain it was cold as hell, but by contrast whomever was in control of the campground’s bathroom had jacked the heater up to almost criminal levels, which was great for those of us who tent camp in the cold and need a blast of heat occasionally. You get a fantastic view of Huntsville, AL at night if you wander the campground and look off the side of the mountain. There is a camp host, and a coded gate to contend with, and yes I was able to get WiFi there in some spots.
Other perks of visiting Monte Sano include the vast array of trails. My favorite one was the Stone Cuts Trail wherein you hike through massive boulders and the park even pushes them as a “bouldering” activity. There’s also the North Alabama Japanese Garden to explore which is inside the park. You can track their website down at https://www.alapark.com/parks/monte-sano-state-park.
