Field Notes Ohio

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117 parks in 7 regions

Berea Falls

Berea · Cuyahoga County

Two tier urban falls over Berea sandstone, below three overhead bridges

25 ftheight

Easywalk

Visiting information you can trust

Content last reviewed: September 2026 — this is when Field Notes Ohio's content was last checked, not a live status.
Primary official source: Official page
Location confidence: Verified property location
Published coordinates for the falls or its trailhead
Check current conditions: Official conditions or closures

Prices, hours, closures, campsite availability and trail conditions shown elsewhere on this page are not live — always confirm with the official source before you go.

A small urban waterfall tucked beneath three bridges in Rocky River Reservation, easy to reach from a small trailside parking area.

Height: About 25 feet across two main drops
Trail: Short walk from parking to an overlook
Managed by: Cleveland Metroparks
Best time: After rain and in spring
Fee: Free
Geology: Berea sandstone over shale

When it flows

A small tributary of Rocky River, so it runs best after rain and in spring and can drop to a thin trickle in a dry summer; it freezes into ice in cold weather.

The story

Berea Falls formed by the same process that made Berea sandstone famous: after glaciers retreated, meltwater found cracks in the hard sandstone cap and seeped into the softer shale beneath it, eroding the shale until blocks of the sandstone fractured off and fell away, a process that continues slowly today. The exposed sandstone here is the same layer quarried just a short distance away in downtown Berea.

Starting in the early 1840s, Berea founder John Baldwin developed a lathe for cutting the local sandstone into grindstones, and Berea stone went on to become internationally known for sharpening tools and for building stone used across the country. The quarries employed generations of English, Scottish, German, Irish, and Polish immigrant workers until synthetic grinding wheels and modern cement largely replaced the trade by the 1940s. Cleveland Metroparks later folded this stretch of the Rocky River gorge, including the falls, into Rocky River Reservation, one of the system's oldest holdings.

Rocky River Reservation is not one of the park ids in the allowed list, so it is not included in the parks array even though the falls is inside it.

Stay behind railings and on marked trails. Wet rock at the top and base of a falls is slick in every season, and most Ohio falls do not allow swimming, wading or climbing. Flow depends on rain: many falls are a trickle in late summer and at their best after a wet spell, in spring, or frozen in a hard winter.