Lava Falls

There’s a waterfall in Laurel County that I named Lava Falls. The name comes from the fact that the first time I creek walked Pounder Branch, it was in the depths of winter. We were walking on ice, wading in frigid water, and the waterfalls were a mixture of frozen and flowing. Along the main branch of the creek, the waterfalls were mostly still, but the splash pools and edges were all like ice castles, making them a sight to see.

We came to a falls on Pounder Branch where there’s a side falls that comes in right at it. The trail that goes back to Van Hook Falls actually passes right above this waterfall. That side falls is what I named Lava Falls. As you can see in the picture, on my first visit when I documented this waterfall, it was completely encased in ice. The water was flowing below the ice on the rock surface. That ice wasn’t like normal waterfall ice. It was like a slow and gradual lava flow hardening as it moves along the hillside, and that’s where the name came from.

What’s interesting is roughly 15 years after I had documented this waterfall, a man from Tennessee came up and wrote a Kentucky waterfall book for one of the big guidebook publishers in America. His front cover is of Lava Falls. It’s always interesting when you document things and have to name them because that’s how you keep them straight in your mind. You can’t name them all the same thing. They need to have something behind them, and that often comes from the story. If there’s no stream name or watercourse name, you end up creating a name based on the story or the adventure from that first visit. So it was fascinating to see that this guy had found this waterfall in my database while working on his book, and my name carried with it without him ever knowing why it’s called Lava Falls, on a stream in the middle of Kentucky where there is no lava.

The waterfall: Lava Falls, Laurel County