A flat, easy boardwalk to two beautiful waterfalls — the wispy 80-foot Silverthread and the thundering 130-foot Dingmans, the second-tallest in Pennsylvania. Wheelchair-accessible.
If you want the finest short walk on this tour, watch for the Dingmans Falls sign and turn west off US-209 here, following Johnny Bee Road a mile or so to the visitor center parking lot. Park there and take the walk — it's the finest on the whole tour, and about the easiest: a flat, wheelchair-friendly boardwalk that carries you back into a cool, dripping, fern-hung glen to not one but two waterfalls.
The first you reach is Silverthread — and the name is perfect. It's a tall, delicate ribbon of water, maybe eighty feet, sliding down a narrow slot in the rock it has slowly sawn for itself, fine as a thread of silver. Then the boardwalk carries you on to the main event: Dingmans Falls, a hundred and thirty feet of white water crashing down a broad rock face in stages — the second-tallest waterfall in all of Pennsylvania, and a genuine showstopper, especially in spring when the snowmelt has it roaring.
This whole glen is a hemlock ravine — dark, cool, humid, mossy, the kind of place that feels ten degrees cooler and a hundred years older than the road you left. Take the boardwalk slow, feel the mist come off the falls, and listen. Then come on back to the car; there's more up the road.
Photo: Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States · CC BY-SA 2.0
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