A NEWLY DISCOVERED 400-FOOT WATERFALL in a Californian national park. “It wasn’t on a map, no one on the trail crew knew about it. People who been here 27 years had never seen it.” Amazing. We forget how big and wild this country is.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Regarding that “undiscovered” waterfall in California, it’s important to take such news with a dose of salt. A few years ago there was a lot of hoopla over the supposed discovery of new waterfalls in a little-visited corner of Yellowstone. What really happened was that someone decided to publish their location, which had been a sort of insider’s secret, in a guidebook. The authors defined the waterfalls as undiscovered purely because information on them hadn’t appeared in print. (Basically, nothing’s real until it’s available on Amazon.com.) Local reaction ran from amusement to outrage.

I’m sure the California falls were less widely known than the Yellowstone ones, but they weren’t really undiscovered. Here’s a passage from that CNN story you linked to:

“A small band of loggers that harvested Douglas firs in the early 1950s left behind a choker cable and part of a bulldozer. A knife blade stuck in a nearby tree indicates that others have also made the trek.

But for park officials, the falls were merely a rumor for many years, said Russ Weatherbee, the wildlife biologist credited with the find.

A couple years ago, Weatherbee was cleaning out a cabinet of old maps when he stumbled across one from the 1960s marked with a note reading “Whiskeytown falls” near Crystal Creek.”

Now, officials are planning to build a trail to the falls and put them on the map. A perfectly valid response, but probably bitter news to whatever backpackers, etc., really did know about the area.