When we first took our children up to see the Sabbaday Falls, they were teens. We had been intrigued by the legend surrounding it of a spectacular site that early settlers would visit on a Sunday after attending church. So we went along, and were no doubt impressed. It would be difficult not to be, for it is, after all, another one of those innumerable geologic-and-aquatic landscapes of nature's irrepressible devising.

It's so long ago I cannot recall details. At that time we would have been a difficult group to impress. For by then we had experienced so many mountain climbs in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, so many difficult mountain trails that had led us to and often past amazing waterfalls that we felt, doubtless, that we had seen the finest of whatever nature had on offer, in that area, and then some.

Five years ago when we took our granddaughter, then in her early teens, with us to share a week's excursion in our favourite mountainous terrain -- to expose her to the thrills of climbing a mountain and gazing far out over a horizon of other peaks marching off into the distance under a wide sky that either welcomed the climb with white scudding clouds in a blue background, or a low ceiling of bruised clouds heralding inconvenient weather for the mountain ascent, undertaken in defiance, regardless -- it had been our first time back to the falls in decades.

She had enjoyed herself, and we had enjoyed her company and the opportunity to share with her our love of the great out-of-doors and in particular mountain range territory. When we introduced her to Sabbaday Falls on that occasion we hardly remembered what our first exposure to it had been like, but found it difficult to believe that what we observed then hadn't astonished us back then, decades earlier. Surely much had been done to the site since our first visit. To elaborate upon nature's work.

Look-outs and a series of steep steps mounting the area where the mountain stream zipped its way downstream, in a series of lovely and one amazingly beautiful rocky outcroppings, lavishing the air with spray from the boiling maelstrom of a mountain run-off in full steam. This time around, on our own, with just one one little dog accompanying, we ventured onto the trail leading to the falls, in a veritable downpour.

It had been raining all night, and continued raining throughout the day. When we embarked on our day's trip from the rented cottage it was heavily overcast with no sign of the weather lifting, and we wore raincoats. Which, on our arrival at the Sabbaday Falls site, to find one other vehicle parked in the lot, would be an absolute necessity if we were to enjoy the outing.

And enjoy it we most certainly did; the well-leafed canopy of trees bowering the trail kept some of the rain from drenching us completely, but the scenery was so captivating, we hardly cared.