Chasing waterfalls at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park in Kenwood

After weeks of rainstorms, when the crests of waves stand high in the creeks, I hike to a waterfall. A favorite is in Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, where the headwaters of Sonoma Creek tumble down boulder-choked Adobe Canyon to the valley floor. During a break in rain, I hurry to the park and find a spot behind an electric car whose vanity plate integrates “O2” in its message, then take the damp trail down from the road to the water.

The creek is the color of pekoe tea. Stream boulders break the flow into fierce white rapids. Earlier, with the first winter storms, this creek ran thick with mud. As the storms continued to produce “runoff events,” the water cleared more with each one. Now, some of the freshest feeding the main creek run as crystalline as glass.

One recent morning, the water ran at nearly 600 cubic feet per second - or almost 270,000 gallons per minute - about 10 times the mean value for that January day over the past seven years. By 2 p.m., when I arrived after an hours-long break in the rain, the flow has halved. I’m familiar with the creek’s sharp rising and falling; I’ve studied the U.S. Geological Survey stream graphs that resemble rollercoaster rides, with their deep plunges and heady climbs depending on precipitation. The more developed the watershed, the sharper the rises and falls in its hydrograph, and this basin has seen many land-use changes that show in its storms.

Now it is the creek that falls, 25 feet according to the park brochure, down among huge boulders of basalt and serpentinite that line the channel. On the map, Sugarloaf Falls appears to dive right over the 800-feet-above-mean-sea-level topographic contour that shows a slope break right in this spot.

There’s so much water. It’s easy to believe, on a wet day like this in an El Niño winter, that the multiyear drought is over. After all, the ferns cling to tree trunks and drip as if this were a rain forest - abundantly watered, with runoff to spare. The roads have been ponding in puddles that drivers have been fording for weeks. County reservoirs are approaching 90 percent full. There’s talk of easing use restrictions.

Drought is an insidious thing, though. It’s like divorce; it takes longer to recover than you think. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reminds us that California’s drought won’t end with just one wet winter. Nearly 60 percent of the land has suffered in the dry season from exceptional drought, the worst category. Dry conditions are expected to persist or intensify widespread areas. Experts at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences have said that 50 years of records show that an El Niño event does not guarantee extra water for Northern California in any given year. Groundwater is also low for agriculture and many households that depend on wells.

Today, though, the water runs high and the falls are churning the water into frothing, turbulent flow. Steelhead trout that stop their upstream migrations here will benefit from the oxygen dissolving in the water through the tumbling it’s getting. The electric car people, too, are breathing the freshened air from a vantage point at the base of the falls.

Falls, I’m remembering, is a sort of hybrid word, not only because it’s used as both a noun and a verb but because it comes from mixed origins. The noun “falls” comes to us from the Old Norse “to fall,” a verb whose meaning is rooted in “downfall” or “sin.”

The word suits this place. It would be a sin to miss a falls like this in a watershed where such high flow is ephemeral. Here, waterfalls resemble the fleeting migration of monarch butterflies or a fast-melting snow day in the mountains. It’s important to seize the day.

Rebecca Lawton is a Sonoma-based ?author and scientist.