Looking Glass Falls

This falls is named for nearby Looking Glass Rock, a massive monolith almost 4000 feet tall named for the way its granite face can sometimes be covered with frozen water in winter, reflecting the sun like a mirror. A river runs by the rock and at the point where I took this photo tumbles 60 feet down into a shallow pool below.
Partway to the summit of the rock is a helipad, used to rescue injured rock climbers, which indicates the treachery of the summit. The falls itself is generally safer, though there have been serious and even fatal accidents. Most famously, in 1989 Corran Addison broke his kayak and three vertebrae in his back after jumping the falls dressed in a Batman costume. He was a pioneer in the sport of waterfall jumping, and at the time it was the highest falls attempt in North America. Since this is in Transylvania County, perhaps he just had his alter ego wrong, and would have had more luck if he had chosen a vampire costume.
I explored a number of different vantage points, including the top and bottom of the falls. I chose to frame my view with late summer wildflowers, and shot with a relatively wide-angle lens to include the trees and sky for a sense of scale. Alice had to travel through the looking glass to reach her magical parallel universe, but I was transported to a special place just looking at Looking Glass Falls.