Steelhead Falls dropping through a mossy rock notch above Hayward Lake near Mission BC

Steelhead Falls, Mission: A 3 km Waterfall Walk That Actually Works Year Round

The rare waterfall hike that is honestly easy rather than easy-with-an-asterisk, and it is best in the wet months everyone else writes off.

Published July 21, 2026

Quick facts

Distance: 3 km
Elevation gain: 75 m
Difficulty: Easy
Time needed: 1-2 hours
Route type: Out and back
Season: Year round. The trailhead sits at low elevation on a paved road that gets ploughed, and the falls run their hardest between November and June. Late August is the one window I would tell someone to skip.
Drive from Vancouver: 1 h 20 min
Transit accessible: No
Dog friendly: Yes
Pass or permit: No pass requiredNo fee, no pass, no reservation. Hayward Lake is a BC Hydro recreation area maintained by BC Hydro, with the adjoining Hayward Reservoir Trail jointly managed with the City of Mission. That means posted rules, actual maintenance and actual liability signage, which is a different world from the unofficial routes elsewhere in this valley. No camping.
Last hiked: June 15, 2026
Traditional territory: S'ólh Téméxw, the traditional and unceded territory of the Stó:lō peoples. The Stave watershed falls within Kwantlen First Nation territory, which extends to the northern reaches of Stave Lake, and the wider Mission area is shared Stó:lō territory including Leq'á:mel and Sq'éwlets

On this page5 sections

Several places in North America are called Steelhead Falls, and the well-photographed one is in central Oregon on the Deschutes River. That is not this. This one is in Mission, British Columbia, in the neighbourhood actually named Steelhead, on a creek that empties into Hayward Lake.

What it is, in plain terms: three kilometres return, 75 metres of gain, about an hour, on a built trail with stairs and bridges and a wooden viewing platform at the falls. There is an outhouse at the trailhead. Very little on this site is that straightforward, and I would rather say so than dress it up.

Getting there

Take Dewdney Trunk Road up past Stave Falls Dam. About a kilometre beyond the dam, on the east side, there is a small gravel lot below road level. It comes up immediately after a bend and is easy to blow past at speed, so slow down once you have the dam in your mirror.

The whole approach is paved. No forest service road, no gravel, no seasonal closure. Any vehicle gets here in any month, which is what makes this trail useful in a way most Fraser Valley waterfalls are not.

The lot holds roughly ten cars, and that is the real constraint. On a warm summer Saturday it is full by mid-morning and the roadside options on a fast, bending road are not good ones. Early start or weekday.

The trail

The route drops from the lot through second-growth forest toward the creek, then follows it up to the falls. It is a properly constructed trail: wooden staircases in the steep sections, bridges over the wet ones, and a boardwalk platform at the base of the waterfall. Kilometre for kilometre it is one of the more pleasant short forest walks in the Fraser Valley.

You can extend it. The trail connects to the Hayward Reservoir Trail, which runs the length of the lake and turns the day into something closer to 14 km, and the Stave Dam Forest Interpretation Trail sits nearby with numbered posts and a District of Mission brochure keyed to them. Pairing Steelhead Falls with the interpretation trail puts you at roughly 5 km and 250 metres of cumulative gain, a fuller morning without becoming a real hike.

The one thing to know about the surface: the wooden infrastructure is slick. Wet boards, mossy boards and frosted boards are three different kinds of slippery and this trail delivers all three across the year. Grip matters more than ankle support here.

The falls, and the edge above them

The viewing platform at the base is the reason this trail is family-scale rather than merely short. It gives you a good look at the falls from a place you are meant to be standing.

There is a scramble line down toward the very base of the falls. People do it. It is loose, wet and not part of the built trail, and it buys you a marginally different angle for a materially worse risk profile. The platform frame is the better photograph anyway.

Season, and the honest bit about August

This is the section that separates a useful guide from a listing. Steelhead Creek is fed by rain and low-elevation snowmelt, not by a glacier, so the falls do exactly what the weather does.

November to April is peak. The creek runs hard, the forest is saturated, the moss is at its greenest and the light is at its most workable. Spring holds up well through freshet. By late July the volume is visibly down, and in a genuinely dry August this waterfall is a trickle over a rock face and people leave disappointed and blame the trail. It is not the trail, it is the calendar. If you have one shot at this and it is August, come back in the rain.

Reported by

Rules, dogs and who this is for

Hayward Lake is a BC Hydro recreation area, maintained by BC Hydro, with the reservoir trail co-managed by the City of Mission. Practically, that means posted rules, real maintenance, pit toilets and no camping. It also means the standard reservoir caveat: water levels are managed, not natural, and the shoreline you see is a function of dam operation on the day.

Dogs are welcome and this is a good trail for them, with the leash caveat above the falls. Pack out waste; there are no bins on the trail.

This is a legitimate first hike for someone, a legitimate outing with young kids, and a legitimate winter option when everything higher up is under snow. Those three together are rarer than they sound.

One email a month: what is melting out, what is snowed in, and where the light is good right now. Written after the hike, not before it.

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Shooting this trail

Photography notes

Best light: Overcast, and ideally overcast during or just after rain. The falls sit in a tight forested notch, so on a clear day between roughly 11am and 3pm you get shafts of hard sun cutting through the canopy onto white water, which is the single worst lighting condition in landscape photography. There is no bracket and no raw file that fixes it. A flat grey Fraser Valley sky is the correct condition here and it is available roughly two hundred days a year. Early morning also works because the notch stays in shade.
Best season: November through April. This is a rain-fed and snowmelt-fed creek rather than a glacier-fed one, so the falls track the wet season directly. December and January produce the most water and the darkest, mossiest, most saturated forest. In a dry August the falls thin out to something you would not have driven for.
Compositions: Vertical from the wooden viewing platform at the base, 24-35mm. The platform sets your position for you, which sounds limiting and is actually a gift: it forces the composition that works and keeps you off the wet rock that would otherwise tempt you.
Long exposure between 1/4 and 1 second. This is a lower-volume waterfall than the Sea to Sky headliners, and long exposures flatter it up to a point: a quarter second gives you silk without erasing the thread structure. Past two seconds it turns into a white blank and you have lost the subject.
The staircase and bridge sections on the approach at 35mm. Mossy wooden infrastructure in second-growth forest is a strong subject in its own right and it is what makes this trail visually distinct from the unbuilt routes nearby. It photographs best soaked.
Tight abstract on the moss and the wet rock face beside the falls at 85-135mm, wide open, hand held. The spray zone here grows things that do not grow ten metres away, and that texture is the frame nobody else brings back.
Gear: Polariser first, ND second. In a wet forest notch the polariser removes the specular grey off every leaf, every rock and every soaked board on the staircase, and the colour recovery is dramatic. It also buys you roughly a stop and a half toward your target shutter speed. A 3-stop ND covers the rest; you rarely need 6 stops in light this dim. A tripod is required for anything under about a fifteenth of a second and the platform is a stable place to put one, which is not true of most waterfall viewpoints. Bring a cloth for the front element and, in winter, expect condensation when you get back in a warm car.