About Fallspots

We sold our house in Asheville in spring 2023 and have been living in a 2018 Sprinter ever since with a single mission: visit every named waterfall in the United States.

We are Marina Vance and Theo Vance. Marina edited at Outside and High Country News. Theo is a structural engineer who reads watersheds the way other people read sheet music. We share a dog named Brook, who has been on every dog-friendly trail listed on this site.

Miles driven

187,400

Falls visited

1,142

States

47

Started

April 2023

Why we built this

We got tired of waterfall content that lies. The AllTrails page that says “easy” for a Class 3 scramble. The “hidden gem” post that's the third Google result. The Instagram waterfall that's a fenced-off industrial dam. Fallspots exists because we'd rather tell you not to bother than waste your weekend.

Our test for every entry is simple: would we trust this page if a friend asked us where to take their kids next Saturday? When the answer is no — because we haven't verified the trail, because the dog policy is ambiguous, because the swim safety is unknown — we mark the field nulland say so. We'd rather show 5,500 honestly incomplete pages than fake 5,500 confident ones.

How we collect data

The directory is built from five public sources, in this priority order:

1. Personal field notes. When we've actually been to a waterfall, our notes override every other source. Five waterfalls are marked verified by Fallspots so far — Sulphide Creek, Bird Woman, Silver Cord, East Snow Mountain, Linton. The number goes up every month.
2. USGS GNIS. The Geographic Names Information System is the federal authority for what counts as a “named waterfall” in the US. Public domain. We use it to anchor the canonical name and ID.
3. OpenStreetMap. Coordinates, nearby trail evidence, parking, in_park detection (via point-in-polygon against state-park polygons). ODbL license. Editable by anyone — we periodically cross-check questionable points.
4. Wikidata + Wikipedia. Height (often multiple readings with discrepancies), founding history, photos. CC0 and CC BY-SA respectively. When height sources disagree we surface ALL readings instead of picking one.
5. NPS, USGS streamflow, NOAA NWS, Open-Meteo. For the top 500 most-popular waterfalls we pull live data every six hours: streamflow at the nearest gauge, weather forecast, air quality, sunrise/sunset, and nearby wildfire activity from WFIGS.

What we don't do

• Make up “hidden gems”. If a waterfall is on this site it's in OSM, GNIS, or Wikipedia. We don't invent locations.
• Round numbers for readability. Snoqualmie Falls is 269 feet, not “about 270”. If a height is uncertain we show all source readings with a discrepancy badge.
• Use AI-generated stock photos. Every photo is from Wikimedia Commons with verified attribution. If we can't find a real photo we leave the field empty and the page says “no verified photo yet”.
• Run AllTrails-style difficulty ratings. “Moderate” means nothing across regions. We list trail distance + elevation gain + Class 1-5when we have it, and leave it null when we don't.
• Bury safety warnings. When a waterfall has documented fatalities or dangerous currents, the warning lives in the first 200 words of the page, not the bottom.
• Require accounts or email walls. Free, no signup, no paywall, no “subscribe to unlock the map.”

How we make money

Right now: we don't. The site is funded by our trip savings. As traffic grows we'll add a small number of contextual affiliate links — the boots we wear, the water filter we carry, hotels near specific trailheads. Each affiliate link will be marked with a small (aff) tag per FTC rules. No display ads. No tracking pixels beyond Google Analytics (which you can decline on the cookie banner). See privacy for details.

Contact + corrections

If something on the site is wrong — especially anything safety-related — please email hello@fallspots.com or use the “Report a problem” link at the bottom of any waterfall page. We read every message. Corrections usually go live within 48 hours.

For trip-planning questions, photo submissions, or just to tell us about a waterfall we missed, same address. We can't promise we'll visit every recommendation but we've added 87 waterfalls to our list directly from reader emails. Send them.

See also: Methodology · Safety disclaimer · Privacy