Upper Boy Scout Falls

Upper Boy Scout Falls is just inside the border of Oldham County near Louisville, Kentucky. When you work and live in the cities around Kentucky instead of near the Daniel Boone National Forest, you often search for waterfalls in your area that you can visit and do some waterfalling locally when the weather is right and the water is flowing and you can’t travel three or four hours to visit a park or the national forest in the mountains of eastern Kentucky.

Several years ago, I moved to the Louisville area, and Boy Scout Falls was one of those that I saw on maps looking at LiDAR. I also had some discussions with an arch hunter who had grown up in Louisville and had gone to a boy scout camp located over in that area, which is where the name of the falls comes from. This falls is the upper of three. There’s a middle and a lower as well. They are all right along the side of a road coming down the hillside, and you may or may not be able to see the guardrail peeking out through the fall foliage in the photo above.

I’ve seen these waterfalls posted many times by other local adventurers and photographers in the Louisville area, as it is easy to park at the bottom and climb to each falls as you go up, photograph them, and get a sense of adventure even though all you are is just below a guardrail, out of sight from the road but still able to hear the traffic whizzing by. It makes you think that every time you’re driving along roads that have cliffs or that drop off with a guardrail, what’s down there? There have been plenty of times I’ve pulled over, hopped out, looked, or drove back by just to see what’s going on. The ground was there, and now it’s gone. That means there’s probably a waterfall.

As you can see in the photo above, this doesn’t make them any less spectacular. You’re not on an adventure as the only human for miles like you could be in some remote parts of the national forest in eastern Kentucky. But you are on your own adventure, right there surrounded by homes and a road. If you live in the Oldham County, La Grange, or Louisville area, I highly recommend this after a good rain to see it with a full curtain. It’s definitely something you could do with a second set of clothes after work one day, especially in the late spring or early fall with daylight savings when the sun is up until pretty late. It doesn’t matter where you live. You can always have an adventure right where you are, right in your community, throughout the state of Kentucky.

The waterfall: Upper Boy Scout Falls, Oldham County