Waterfalls in Louisiana

6 waterfalls in Louisiana across 3 counties, from the USGS dataset; 2 with a measured height. The tallest is Rock Falls at 13 ft. All US waterfalls.

State: Louisiana 47

6 waterfalls

Louisiana's six waterfalls: piney hills, an island of high ground and a loess bluff

Six named waterfalls turn up across Louisiana, most of them minor drops in the piney uplands of Kisatchie National Forest, with the rest split between an isolated rise of high ground near the Mississippi River and a loess bluff on the western state line.

Where the waterfalls are

Natchitoches Parish holds three of the six, in and around Kisatchie National Forest — Louisiana's only national forest, 604,000 acres of pine hills and hardwood bottoms across seven parishes since 1930. Kisatchie Falls drops on Kisatchie Bayou, a federally designated Wild and Scenic River known for clear-water swimming holes; Little Bayou Pierre Cascade runs on Bynoque Branch, and Odum Falls on Long Branch.

East of the forest, Catahoula Parish holds Rock Falls and Saint Marys Falls near Sicily Island, an isolated rise of high ground standing above the Mississippi River floodplain. West of it, West Feliciana Parish holds Woodriff Falls, on the outlet of Pugh Lake, in loess-bluff country that continues across the state line into Mississippi's Clark Creek Natural Area.

Waterfalls worth the trip

Rock Falls, 13 feet on a tributary of Big Creek, is the tallest waterfall in Louisiana; the red-blazed Rock Falls Trail, a 0.7-mile loop in the J.C. "Sonny" Gilbert Wildlife Management Area, descends steeply into the gorge below Sicily Island to reach it.
Kisatchie Falls, on Kisatchie Bayou near Robeline, drops less than a meter and reads more as sliding rapids than a true waterfall; the bayou's swimming holes and a primitive campground sit close by, and the spot was a filming location for the 1991 movie "The Man in the Moon."
Little Bayou Pierre Cascade, 3 feet on Bynoque Branch, and Odum Falls, on Long Branch, complete the Natchitoches Parish group.

Permits and safety

Visitors to Rock Falls without a Louisiana hunting or fishing license need a Wild Louisiana Stamp to enter the J.C. "Sonny" Gilbert Wildlife Management Area. The trail into the falls descends steeply into the gorge the creek has cut below Sicily Island, so the last stretch calls for careful footing.