All pursuits involve squabbling among participants, but waterfalling is different in important ways. Birders, for example, don’t typically argue over the names of birds because there are established databases, and the issue of who was the first to see a particular bird is rarely an issue because everyone knows they can’t be the first. (Rediscovering a bird thought to be extinct excepted.) With waterfalls, those are contentious subjects.

Well-established names that have been in use for decades.


This supersedes even names on U.S. Geological Survey maps. For example, Blue Ridge Parkway’s well-known 

is listed as Upper Falls on the USGS map.


USGS names are as official as it gets. They take precedence over all other names except for very well established and accepted names.

Names on U.S. government or state government maps or other official literature.


This includes names from the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, and North Carolina State Parks.

Names that local people have been using for decades.

Names on regional or local maps or other literature published by a county or city government agencies.

For public property, names used by employees of the managing agency.


Some waterfalls aren’t listed on any maps or publications, but they have names used by people in the managing agency.

For private property, names bestowed by the property owner.


Property owners can, of course, call their waterfall anything they like. However, on this website, I choose names in the above categories first. One issue with private property is a new owner calling the waterfall by a different name, such as the current owners of 

 calling it Cathedral Falls. For this site, I use the historical name as the principal name.


I use the name that was first bestowed on the waterfall, as best as I can determine, provided that the name is more than around 10 years old and the waterfall is on public property. 

For NCWaterfalls.com, I use the following naming convention, which is ranked in order of importance. 

 The past 10 years have seen an explosion of waterfallers finding and naming countless waterfalls. One person names the waterfall this week, and another one comes along next week and gives it a different name. One posts it on Facebook, the other adds it to Gaia. And they both get upset when they find out that the other one is calling “their” waterfall by a different name.

On more than one occasion someone has sent me a photo of a waterfall they “discovered,” along with the name they bestowed upon it. They were hoping that I didn’t know anything about the falls and that I would acknowledge the name they had chosen. In some of these cases, I didn’t know about the falls at that time, but I didn’t adopt the names they had given.

Later, I was going through some old emails and discovered that someone else had found those waterfalls earlier and sent me info about them. In one case, the email was a couple decades old. I had totally forgotten about those old references. Had I acknowledged the more recent names, and worse, published those names, it would have been very unfair to those who had contacted me earlier.

I don’t pay much attention to new waterfall names that don’t follow the convention above. If someone bestows a name that somehow manages to muscle its way past all the other ones and becomes well established and doesn’t violate this convention, I’ll acknowledge it.

Names for private waterfalls given by non-property owners without the owner’s permission. 

I don’t understand how someone could feel that it is okay to publish a name they made up for a waterfall on someone else’s property. To make matters worse, I know some cases where the person who named the falls trespassed on the property to view it.

Names on mapping apps like Gaia, AllTrails, and Google Maps.

 There is nothing official about these names. I may research the names to see if there is any validity to them, but in most cases, it’s just someone making up a name and wanting everyone else to know.

Have to say, this one really bothers me. If it only happened for remote, off-trail waterfalls it wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s common for roadside waterfalls that untold numbers of people have seen long before someone had the hubris to give it their own name. In one of the worst examples, someone has named a couple of the small waterfalls beside US 276, north of Brevard. These waterfalls have been seen by gazillions of people, going back to when George Vanderbilt owned this part of Pisgah National Forest. To my knowledge, these falls have never had a published name, yet someone decided that they, out of all these gazillions, should have the right to name them.

The problem with this is that these names are published on map apps that are used by people who have no idea if the names are legitimate or not. They see the name and assume it’s accurate, so they start using it. If it’s a waterfall that doesn’t already have a name, like the ones beside US 276, the only real harm is in stroking the ego of the person who named it. But this happens regularly with waterfalls that 

 already have accepted names, so now we have names on Gaia that don’t match well-established names, which creates all kinds of confusion.

Scroll down the page to read more about map apps and why so much of the info on them is inaccurate.

Names I mostly ignore.

I must use some sort of designation for the waterfalls to distinguish them from others and permit looking them up in the index.

The first method is to use the waterway, as in “Waterfall on Example Creek.”

If I know of or think there could be more than one unnamed waterfall on the same stream, I call it “Waterfall 1 on Example Creek,” with subsequent falls called 2, 3, and so on.

In cases where both the waterway and the stream it flows into are unnamed, I’ll usually call it “Waterfall on tributary of X.” In certain situations, I’ll use another landmark, such as “Waterfall in X Park.” And sometimes it makes more sense to use designations such as “lower,” “middle,” and “upper” instead of numbers.

If you’ve read my previous writings on this subject, you’ll see that I’ve done a flip flop on my flip flop. For the first two editions of 

, I did not bestow names to many of the waterfalls, but when I published the third edition, I determined that I might have made a mistake. What I had intended to be only designations to tell the waterfalls apart were being used as the actual name, something I never intended to happen. So, I flipped and provided names for several of the unnamed falls.

That was 2014. Today, as I’ve been saying, there is too much chaos out there for me to feel comfortable naming most waterfalls. So, I’m choosing what I feel is the lesser of evils.

How I designate unnamed waterfalls on this website.

Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat. You did not discover that waterfall. No one alive today is the first person to see a North Carolina waterfall. Native Americans, settlers, loggers, miners, hunters, fishers, and hopelessly lost hikers have already laid eyes on all of them.

I would venture to say that you’re probably not even the first waterfaller to see the falls. There are lots of outdoor enthusiasts who are finding waterfalls but not publishing or posting about their adventures on social media.

I discovered the waterfall, so I should get to name it, right?

One of my waterfalling regrets from several years ago is suggesting the term “documented” as a method for waterfallers to establish some credibility with their discoveries, the idea being that if you publish the info in some manner, there is a record of when you visited the waterfall. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have a greater right to name it, but it might help avoid disputes.

In the years since, I have grown to hate that term. It doesn’t matter when someone “documents” their discovery. There is still no way to know how many people saw it and possibly named it before them. There is no waterfall clearinghouse, where everyone submits their information for the Official Board on Waterfall Names to process and establish the rule of the land. 

You can't expect that just because you made a post on Facebook, an app that not all waterfallers use and those who do may not be on it regularly, like me, gives you some sort of legitimacy on your documentation claims. 

“Documenting” a waterfall means basically nothing.

But I’m the first to document it.

Yes, I did. Several years ago. But I would not name a waterfall today unless I had a high degree of certainty that it hadn’t been discovered by modern waterfallers. Given that it’s nearly impossible to have that certainty today, it’s unlikely that I will ever name another North Carolina Waterfall except in certain circumstances. (Given permission by the property owner or managing agency, for example.)

When I first started waterfalling, Mark Zuckerberg was still a toddler. The only widely visible outlet for the names I chose was in my book. Similar situation for Rich Stevenson with the original NCWaterfalls.com website. Even if someone else did find the same waterfall and give it a different name, there was no easy way for that name to cause confusion. Not so today, where you have hordes of people finding and naming the same waterfalls. 

To be honest, I have always had reservations about naming natural features. I can see the usefulness for communication, but it’s at the expense of perpetuating humanity’s feeling of supremacy and dominance over all things. In my 40-some years of serious waterfalling, I’ve admittedly vacillated a bit on this, but it has always made me a little uncomfortable, and today I’m firmly in the camp of 

we don’t need to name every dang thing we see!

What about you, Kevin? You named a bunch a waterfalls, didn’t you?

Nothing. I’m not telling anyone what to do. I’m simply telling you how I feel about the situation.

Look, there is no such thing as the Waterfall Naming Police. You can call a waterfall anything you like. You can publish that name in a book, map, or on your Facebook page. No one is going to come to your house and confiscate your computer. If you think Whitewater Falls really is two separate waterfalls, make up a name for the upper and lower drops and share it with the world. Just don’t expect everyone to acknowledge those names.

What gives you the right to tell us what to do?

Some folks take their naming efforts to new levels by installing signs at waterfalls. If it’s a private waterfall and you’re the owner, more power to you. That’s how I learned the names for 

, among others. If you do this on public land, as in a national forest, you’re defacing public property.

Katies Falls provides a good example of the inherent problems with indiscriminate waterfall naming. Someone attached a metal plaque to a rock at the base of the falls, with the name Katies Falls on it. When I first saw it, I was perturbed. What gives them the right to name this waterfall and desecrate this rock? The waterfall is right beside the road, so I’m thinking there’s no way they discovered it first.

As I read the words below the name, I realized I had jumped to conclusions. Jacob Moore, a resident of Ellijay, named the falls for his daughter. Moore died in 1933, so I’d say Katies Falls is an established name. Also, the waterfall is on private property, so the family certainly has a right to place this plaque.

This plaque was not there when I researched the second edition of my book. What if I had decided to assign my own name to Katies Falls? Maybe something like Slimy Slug Falls. Because it would be printed in a book, everyone outside of the Ellijay community might have accepted it. And what a dishonor it would have been to the memory of Katherine Allen Moore Rhinehart, who passed away in 2000.

 is another exception. The wooden sign at the falls looked like it had been there for decades when I first saw it. Considering that it was likely placed long before the modern waterfalling crowd had started going there and because I had not heard of any other names for the waterfall, I felt comfortable adopting it. The sign rotted away several years ago. 

Wooden signs and metal plaques.

In some cases, indiscriminate waterfall naming can have serious consequences. An example is 

 in the Canada region of North Carolina. Decades ago, I talked to some college students from Western Carolina University who told me the name of this waterfall is Paradise Falls. Subsequent conversations with several people confirmed it. It wasn’t until a few years after the second edition of my book that I learned the name is not correct. 

Locals have always referred to this waterfall as Wolf Creek Falls. 

, to them, is a nearby Tanasee Creek waterfall located on private property. I’m guessing that at some point, some college student got the names confused and began calling the Wolf Creek waterfall Paradise Falls. The waterfall is a very popular hangout for WCU students and the name stuck.

Unfortunately, and to my chagrin, I’m more responsible for perpetuating the error than anyone. I printed the name in a book! Suddenly, people who had no idea the waterfall even existed started calling it Paradise Falls. The serious consequence of this is that the local rescue squads sometimes don’t know which waterfall they’re supposed to go to when they get a call.

The waterfall on Wolf Creek sees a disproportionate number of accidents. (I don’t want to stereotype, but let’s just say that alcohol and college students aren’t a great combination at a waterfall.) When the rescue squad gets a call that someone is hurt at Paradise Falls, they can’t assume that it is the waterfall on Wolf Creek just because it’s more popular. For all they know, it could be a local person who is hurt on the real Paradise Falls.

BTW, I have been questioned on the accuracy of this statement about Paradise Falls. The information comes from an email written in 2005 by a local trout fisher who had discussed this with a member of the Jackson County Rescue Squad.

More issues with indiscriminate naming.

While there is no such thing as the Waterfall Naming Police, there is an official naming organization. The U.S. Board On Geographic Names is responsible for determining the official place names for landmarks in the United States. They determine what names to use on the USGS topo maps and any other official government publications. For nerds like me, reading their guidelines is fascinating stuff.

You can submit a waterfall name to the Board for consideration, but it’s a long, detailed process in which you’ll likely either fail or give up. It’s not impossible, though, so if you’re determined to make your chosen name as official as official gets, this is the way to do it.

One bit of related trivia is that official government place names rarely use apostrophes. Look at the Rosman USGS quad. You’ll see a Catheys Creek and 

, even though both names are possessive—they were named after George Cathey, not George Catheys. I also follow this naming standard. The National Forest Service is not so fastidious, however, so if you use topo maps that are labeled as “MODIFIED FOR USDA FOREST SERVICE USE,” you may see some apostrophes.

Officially, official waterfall names.

In a troubling parallel to the proliferation of false news on social media, some of what you see on popular maps like Gaia, AllTrails, Google, and OpenStreetMap is not accurate. I’ve noticed a big increase in the number of waterfalls that have been added to these maps in recent years, with much of it just plain wrong.

Some of it is objective, such as misspellings and incorrect GPS locations, but people are also adding waterfall names that they have bestowed, seemingly without doing any due diligence before posting. In some cases, the names are being applied to waterfalls that already have established, accepted names.

When people see something on Gaia or Google Maps, the tendency is to believe it’s true. It’s like reading something in a book. There is an assumed validity to it that doesn’t exist to the same extent as, say, a personal conversation or social media post. But when there is no mechanism for fact checking, it’s the Wild West out there.

What all this means is that these apps, or rather their policies for editing, are greatly contributing to the misinformation regarding not just waterfall names, but everything else that’s on the map. That’s why I totally disregard any waterfall names I see on a digital map until I do some research.

You may be wondering how someone is able to add something false to a map. I don’t know for sure how AllTrails works, but Gaia gets info from OpenStreetMap, which anyone can edit. On Google Maps, you need only to click “Add a missing place.” I haven’t gone through the entire process with Google but based on all the incorrect info on the map, apparently there is no real fact checking happening.

A little more about mapping apps.

Twisting Falls on Elk River, just over the state line in Tennessee, is a perfect example of how easy it is to get everything twisted up. (See what I did there?) The waterfall has been called Twisting Falls at least as early as 1934, when it was listed as such on a USGS topographic map. The 1939 book, 

, refers to it as Twisting Falls, and gives Big Falls of the Elk, and Greasy Falls as alternative names.

It’s called Twisting Falls because it twists, making several drops through a curvy mini canyon, with the river abruptly changing direction at each drop.

Sometime in the early 1990s, as I understand it, someone floated in a boat over the lower drop of Twisting Falls and, as the story goes, nearly broke their back. The unfortunate boater, or perhaps his friends, started calling that drop Compression Falls and it spread quickly through the boating community.

Boaters name every drop of every river, no matter how trivial they may seem to waterfallers, so this was no big deal. Boater names are a lot like Las Vegas. You know, what happens on the river stays on the river. But waterfallers soon picked up on the Compression Falls moniker and somewhere down the line someone decided that Compression Falls was the “official” name for that lower drop, and all the other drops upstream are Twisting Falls. They removed the final twist of Twisting Falls, gave it a new name, and declared the real twisting falls to be only the upper drops.

No amount of stating facts or applying common sense seems to make any headway with those who insist that Compression Falls is an independent waterfall from Twisting Falls. Yet, to believe this, it means you must also believe that the USGS officials who accepted the name Twisting Falls gave it only to the small, upstream drops and totally ignored the biggest and most spectacular drop just a few yards downstream, without giving it any name at all. Same for whoever started calling it Big Falls of the Elk.

We’re still not done with the Twisting Falls saga. 

, a whitewater paddling guide published in 2005, plainly states that the “real” Compression Falls is 

, a few miles upstream in North Carolina. The book names the lower drop of Twisting Falls “Elk River Falls.”

So, which one is the “real” Compression Falls? I have no idea, but it’s amusing to think that if it’s Elk Falls, those who insist that the lower drop of Twisting Falls is Compression Falls don’t even have it in the right state!

Whew, I just fried my brain writing this!

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