Whiskeytown, Calif. ? Dick McDermott knows these parts as well as any man can.

The 92-year-old used to earn a meager living mining the creeks that meander through the deeply wooded hills. He has slogged through the brush and hiked overgrown logging roads, hunting deer and gathering wood for his homemade fiddles.

But McDermott says he’s never laid eyes on the nearly 400-foot waterfall that park officials recently discovered in a remote corner of the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, 43,000 acres of wilderness in northern California.

“Sure, I was surprised,” he said from his home in the park, where he’s lived for more than 70 years. “I’ve been all around that place, I never seen ’em.”

Until recently, very few had seen the roaring water that tumbles three tiers before pouring neatly into Crystal Creek. That such a spectacle should evade even park officials for nearly 40 years is remarkable, said park superintendent Jim Milestone.

“It wasn’t on a map, no one on the trail crew knew about it. People who been here 27 years had never seen it,” said Milestone, who is leading an effort to clear a trail to the newly named Whiskeytown Falls. It’s expected to be finished by next summer.

There’s no doubt the falls have had visitors over the years. The Wintu Indians were probably the first, although archeologists have so far found no traces on the site. A small band of loggers that harvested Douglas firs in the early 1950s left behind a choker cable and part of a bulldozer. A knife blade stuck in a nearby tree indicates that others have also made the trek.

But for park officials, the falls were merely a rumor for many years, said Russ Weatherbee, the wildlife biologist credited with the find.

A couple years ago, Weatherbee was cleaning out a cabinet of old maps when he stumbled across one from the 1960s marked with a note reading “Whiskeytown falls” near Crystal Creek.

“I just decided to go looking for it. But I went in and hiked up and never found anything,” Weatherbee said. The map had been more than a mile off.

In the spring of 2003, he was looking at global imaging system maps on his computer when he saw a stretch in the creek that dropped in altitude quickly with a sliver of white leading through it.

“I thought, ‘That looks like white water to me,”‘ he said.

The falls are best viewed from a spot Milestone calls Artist’s Point, where a sweaty hiker can sit and admire the rushing water from a rocky jut. Milestone said he wants to bring groups of painters there for inspiration.