Waterfall Wednesday: Hector Falls

Today’s waterfall is one that probably many of you know and have visited. I’ve visited this one several times over the years and it’s always interesting to see how different it looks depending on how much water is flowing through it.

Hector Falls is located in Burdett, New York on Route 414. You can find it along the east side of Seneca Lake about 3.4 miles north of Watkins Glen. There are areas to parallel park near the falls on the sides of the road (the traffic does move fast along this section of road).

The top portion of the falls can be seen to the right of the road (while driving north). This top section is 50 feet high and has a crest of 25 feet. The waterfall is a series of vertical plunges and vertical cascades.

Hector Falls is said to be 165 feet tall in total (or almost 250 feet if you include the cascades at the very top of the hill) and is a series of three different waterfalls. The bottom portions of the falls are on private property but can seen by watercraft on Seneca Lake.

I was a little surprised that I couldn’t find a lot of history readily available for this waterfall. Like many waterfalls in the area, I expected that there would be a rich history of mills that were located here to take advantage of the water power that the falls generates. With a lot of digging I was able to find that there was a mill at the site in 1801 built by Samuel Seely.

Painting Hector Falls

I’ve painted Hector Falls twice now. Once during the 2017 Around the Finger Lakes Summer Mosaic project and then again this past year for the New York Waterfalls Mosaic project (both collections can be viewed here). Since I painted this waterfall previously, I wanted to make sure to do something different for this years painting. I decided that I would use some reference pictures that I took towards the end of the winter of the falls.

My favorite part of painting this waterfall was playing with the light and shadows with the snow, especially on the hillside to the right of the falls.