The short road to Nooksack Falls is at milepost 40.5 on the Mount Baker Highway, a little less than ten miles east of the town of Glacier and a little more than half a mile beyond the turnoff to the old site of the town of Excelsior.
The viewpoint is set behind a chain link fence that many people naively walk around to get a better view.
In recent years ten have plunged to their death, including people who have fallen in upstream of the falls and have gone over, falling all 170 feet, and at least one pregnant tourist.
The only known survivor of such a fall is Ryan Reynolds, 22, of Blaine, who slipped off a narrow ledge beneath the fenced off viewing area on New Year's Eve 2006, tumbling and then falling about 100 feet onto a partly submerged rock in the river just below where Wells Creek flows into the Nooksack from the south, opposite the viewing area.
Though amazingly uninjured, it took rescuers almost four hours' work in the dark to get him back up the sheer cliffs.
Reynolds, who builds and maintains high-level scaffolding for a local refinery and is used to working at heights, strongly recommends against anyone going outside the fence.
"I'm probably as good as anyone at negotiating narrow walkways with precarious footing," he said afterwards, "and I couldn't do it. It looks deceptively easy, but it's a real death trap."