The Ricketts Falls & the Named Water

As you come down through the middle of Glen Leigh, you pass two falls that carry the family's own name — R.B. Ricketts Falls and F.L. Ricketts Falls — named for the Colonel himself and his kin. It's a fitting thing, because the man named nearly all of these waterfalls with his own hand. When Robert Bruce Ricketts opened up this glen and cut the first trails, back in the eighteen-nineties, there were all these unnamed drops, and he gave them names — more than twenty of them.

And here's the striking thing about the names he chose. He gave a few to family and friends, like these Ricketts and Reynolds falls. But most of them — the great majority — he named for the Native American nations: Seneca, Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Onondaga, Erie, Tuscarora, Delaware, Mohican, Huron, Wyandot. Fall after fall, the names of the peoples who lived across this region and beyond, long before any lumber baron came. Now, it's worth being clear-eyed about it — these are the names Ricketts chose to honor the nations, not necessarily what any one people called this exact spot. But there's something powerful in it all the same: a whole staircase of falling water, each drop carrying the name of a nation, spoken every time a hiker reads a trail sign. Boone has the fuller story of those names. Keep descending carefully — we're coming down to the last few falls now.