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The 61-year-old waterfall hunter glides nimbly down the beaten path. He dodges granite boulders, ducks under fallen hemlocks, hops over ancient Douglas fir roots heaving from the frosty loam, all with the ease of someone whose soles have lost more rubber to bedrock than sidewalk.

"Hear that?" he says, a swollen creek whispering through the trees.

His pace quickens.

Twelve years ago, when Tony Greenfield started a campaign to track down and document all of British Columbia's major waterfalls, nobody paid much attention.

"I felt like I was the only guy doing this," he says, stopping to peer through the trees for a glance at Chapman Falls.

"There was no information, no lists, nothing to go on."

He forged on alone, facing off with grizzlies, breaking impossible trails, flying into remote hinterlands and riding jet boats up swirling rivers along the way.

Then a tree-planting contractor, Mr. Greenfield aimed to write an encyclopedic guide to the province's waterfalls, but that wasn't his only motive.

For him, laying eyes on white foam shooting over a caprock brink verges on the divine.

Transcendence, he says, "is the unifying feature of my experiences."

There's also the matter of dams. Many B.C. waterfalls went dry during periods of dam construction over the past 75 years, and with Premier Gordon Campbell recently vowing to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 33 per cent in 12 years, interest in building clean, new hydroelectric sources is growing.

"Perhaps the book will help," Mr. Greenfield says.

Now, with his manuscript nearly finished, Mr. Greenfield is no longer short of falls-crazy friends. Hundreds contribute to World-Waterfalls.com, the first international database of waterfalls, where enthusiasts post pictures and lay out hiking routes.

Among that burgeoning international community, British Columbia is considered prime territory. By geography alone, the province is a waterfall-chaser's haven: It's big, it's steep and it's wet.

"It's really one of the last unexplored areas in terms of waterfalls," says Bryan Swan, who runs World-Waterfalls.com from Seattle. "It has the potential of holding some of the world's last great undiscovered waterfalls."

Despite an influx of explorers, the undisputed Dr. Livingstone of B.C.'s uncharted cataracts remains Mr. Greenfield, a bespectacled tour guide operator with a bushy salt-and-pepper beard. Over the last 12 years alone, he's documented 253 waterfalls plunging down rock faces in every corner of British Columbia.

The first was Chapman Falls, which cascades from a hill near his home in Sechelt, 70 mountainous kilometres northwest of Vancouver. He first laid eyes on it in 1969. He was fresh out of university in England then and decided he'd see the world before returning home. But Chapman Falls and the surrounding Sunshine Coast cast a spell on him. He never left.

Back on the trail, he's spotted the first step in a staircase of four 15-foot drops. "This is our first look," he says, pointing down a dense ravine to the whitewater below. "That alone is a very beautiful waterfall, but there's lots more to see yet." He bounds onward to the head of the falls.

Mr. Greenfield spurns high-tech hiking gear, preferring jeans, a leather jacket and a faded ball cap on the trip to Chapman Falls. His spartan attire doesn't hold him back from extreme manoeuvres. On one recent trip to Keyhole Falls, a 70-foot waterfall that sprays violently from a hanging slot canyon near Pemberton, he wrapped his body around a scraggly pine at the ravine's edge and hung precariously over the cliff to get a better look. "The turbulence was mind-boggling," he says.

During a fly-in trip to remote Hunlen Falls in the Great Bear Rainforest two years ago, it took a forest fire to turn him back.

But like any hunter, he's sometimes skunked. Searching northern British Columbia for a dot on a map labelled Pinchi Falls, Mr. Greenfield drove and hiked for hours. Along the way he was drenched in a thunderstorm, devoured by mosquitoes and approached by two black bears.

When he finally arrived at the map point, there was nothing but a drip. "It was the figment of someone's imagination. That wasn't a happy day, but it had to be done. If something is marked as a waterfall on a map, I go there."

All of these hair-raising anecdotes have made their way into his manuscript for The 100 Best Waterfalls in British Columbia, which is complete but for two or three niggling destinations. One waterfall in particular has become Mr. Greenfield's nemesis.

"Cariboo Falls is the only one still bugging me," he says. "It's the bane of my existence."

In two attempts to reach Cariboo Falls, located near Quesnel in central British Columbia, he and hiking partner Dan McGinnis have suffered "a few kilometres of horrendous bushwhacking" before turning around. He's planning a third attempt this summer.

Not every chaser takes so many risks. Mr. Swan, who'll drive up to 3,200 kilometres to see a waterfall between shifts at Office Depot, stops short of chartering planes and jet boats.

"Tony is the only one in B.C. going to such serious lengths that I know of," says Mr. Swan, whose interest in waterfalls began 20 years ago at the age of 6.

"Other kids got interested in airplanes and fire trucks," he explains. "I got interested in waterfalls. It was something cool to me."

At 26, having tracked down more than 1,000 waterfalls, Mr. Swan still maintains that child's sense of wonder. As soon as the weather warms up, he'll spend every weekend chasing.

This summer he has his sights set on several unknown B.C. cataracts he discovered by scouring Google Earth.

At the top of Chapman Falls, Mr. Greenfield leans over the ice-encrusted canyon wall. "One thing about waterfalls is the mood changes all the time," he says, speaking over the whitewater and staring at the crystal-clear plunge pool at the foot of one cascade.

"I've been up here after a deluge and this whole system is absolutely out of control. It's a white sheet of water coming down. Today, it's in a quieter mood."

Compared with the grandeur of a few dozen other B.C. falls, Chapman barely ranks. Mr. Greenfield has a couple of favourites: Helmcken Falls in Wells Gray Park and the Monkman Cascades, a rarely visited spectacle in northern B.C. where he and Mr. McGinnis named one plunge after Mr. McGinnis's father, Shorty McGinnis, a horse wrangler on the survey crew that discovered the Monkmans in 1937.

All lists invite dispute. But among waterfall chasers, the contention is amplified. Enthusiasts can't even agree on what a waterfall is, never mind how to measure its merits.

To avoid controversy, World-Waterfalls.com includes four different grading systems: by scenery, absolute magnitude, visual magnitude and Beisel Waterfall Ranking. The latter three are based on complex algorithms that incorporate a falls' height and volume.

"Measurements aren't my interest," Mr. Greenfield says. "My definition of waterfall is if it looks like a waterfall and sounds like a waterfall, then it's probably a waterfall."

Even at Chapman, a waterfall he's glimpsed dozens of times, he lingers in silence for several minutes watching the water flow.

"When I started this," he says, "it seemed like a decent thing to do for the next 30 years. A good way to spend a life."

Finding B.C.'s world-class waterfalls

Former tree-planting contractor Tony Greenfield aims to track down all

of British Columbia's waterfalls and document them in an encylopedia-like guidebook. The map locations (right) represent just five of the 253 waterfalls he's documented.

BRITISH COLUMBIA

Monkman Cascades, near Tumbler Ridge

Hunlen Falls, near Bella Coola

Helmcken Falls, Wells Gray Provincial Park

Chapman Falls, near Sechelt

Keyhole Falls, near Pemberton

HOW TALL ARE THE FALLS?

British Columbia has some of the tallest waterfalls in the world. Here's how a few examples measure up in terms of height:

Helmcken Falls; 462 feet

Eiffel Tower, Paris; 984 feet

Hunlen Falls; 1,226 feet

Takakkaw Falls; 1,248 feet

Della Falls; 1,443 feet

CN Tower, Toronto; 1,815 feet

SOURCE: WORLD-WATERFALLS.COM