The McCloud River Falls are the headline sight, a three-tier waterfall complex strung along a short section of the river about ten miles east of town off Highway 89. Lower Falls is the easiest to reach: a roar of white water dropping into a wide turquoise pool that doubles as the area's swimming hole on hot summer days. There are picnic tables, fire rings, and a small parking lot right at the brink.
A well-graded forest path links all three falls in roughly three miles round-trip. Middle Falls is the showpiece, a fifty-metre-wide curtain of water that pours over a basalt cliff into a deep amphitheatre — the largest and most photographed of the three. Upper Falls is narrower, more cascade than curtain, but the basalt cliffs framing it are spectacular. The trail is open all year; in winter it freezes into something genuinely otherworldly.