The Unsung Waterfalls of Yosemite Valley

One takes their chance when deciding to visit Yosemite Valley in the springtime. The storms of winter are never quite done by then, and you may find yourself in a valley full of clouds. That's where I found myself a week back, touring the Yosemite region with my students. It had been two weeks of no precipitation, but on Saturday, the storms came back for a day.

Sentinel Falls (left) and unnamed fall (right)

So it was that we were playing hide and seek with the iconic peaks and waterfalls of Yosemite. We did get to see most of them, with Half Dome being the notable no-show. Still, clouds add a wonderful aura of mystery if they are scattered enough to reveal bits and pieces (like a feather boa dancer). It's on such days that a person can realize the full richness of waterfalls in Yosemite.

Lower Sentinel Falls

Yosemite is famous for Bridalveil Fall, Yosemite Falls, along with Nevada and Vernal Falls on the main channel of the Merced River. But in spring when the snowmelt is high or if there is heavy rain, the valley walls come alive with falling water. Sentinel Falls (above) would be world-famous were it not on the valley wall opposite Yosemite Falls, and if it didn't dry up most years before June. It falls 1,920 feet in a series of drops, of which the longest is about 500 feet. There is an equally high fall to the west.

Royal Arches Cascades

Royal Arches Cascades are on the cliffs behind the Ahwahnee Lodge (currently called the Grand Majestic or something like that). They have a total drop of about 1,250 feet. Unlike most of the others, it's not overly hard to scramble to the base of the falls in the forest east of the lodge.

Staircase Falls

A number of times I've been eating pizza at Curry Village (now called Half Dome Village because of a copyright fight), and noticed the sound of falling water. A little searching of the cliffs reveals Staircase Falls, which drop over a series of jointed ledges of granitic rock below Glacier Point. They total 1,300 feet, but like the others they are often dry by early summer.

Staircase Falls from Curry Village

There are lots of other waterfalls to discover this time of year. These are just the ones that chose to reveal themselves to us during our brief visit under the clouds. You'll be able to find plenty of others if you can get here.

I'm hard put to describe my favorite time at Yosemite Valley. Winter, for the snow and the quiet, spring for the greenery and the Dogwoods blooming and the full waterfalls, fall for the bright colors, or summer for the access. If there is a least favorite time, it's probably August when the crowds are at their greatest but the waterfalls aren't. But you know what? It's worth a visit any time you can get there.

Yosemite's Dance of the Seven Veils: The Valley on a Rainy Day

She freed and floated on the air her arms
Above dim veils that hid her bosom's charms...
The veils fell round her like thin coiling mists
Shot through by topaz suns and amethysts

 "The Daughter of Herodias" by Arthur O'Shaughnessy

It goes without saying, but when the rain falls, Yosemite is a different place.  When storms are moving up the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite Valley produces strange cloud effects, due to a half-mile deep cleft that has warmer air currents rising into the storm clouds. The familiar big rocks like Half Dome or El Capitan may be hidden completely, or they may reveal themselves in small bits at a time, like the dancer Salome or her many successors throughout time.

Upper Yosemite Falls

I took two trips to Yosemite Valley in April. The second trip on the 30th was clear and sparkling like a diamond. You can see the spectacular beauty in the previous post about the centennial of the National Park Service. The weather forecasts for the first trip back on the 9th weren't so promising. They suggested precipitation all morning with a chance of clearing in the afternoon. The "clearing" part wasn't to be. The rain never stopped from the time we arrived until the moment we left. It ebbed and flowed, sometimes declining to a light drizzle that allowed us to make note stops. But we never saw the whole valley that day. Just little bits at a time.

Staircase Falls from near Curry Village

A disappointment? Oh, not at all. Clouds give the cliffs a sense of perspective and depth that is not always possible on a clear day. The cliffs can seem higher, appearing above the clouds. And the waterfalls...on a rainy day, there are waterfalls everywhere, in the most unlikely spots, and many are impossibly high, rivaling Yosemite Falls in some cases. And the familiar falls are booming.

Staircase Falls come off the cliffs near Glacier Point above Curry Village (yeah, I know, it's called Half Dome Village at the moment). The falls last only a few weeks in the spring and during storms, but fall in a series of steps for a combined drop of 1,300 feet (400 meters). On a quiet day one can hear the water splattering on the cliffs while munching pizzas in the village (always a happy memory!). The "staircase" is formed by a series of prominent diagonal joints (pressure-release fractures) that run across the nearly sheer cliff.

Upper Yosemite Falls

Yosemite Falls are the most famous and iconic of the falls in the valley. They include the upper falls with a drop of 1,430 feet (440 meters), the Middle Cascades at 635 feet (206 meters), and the Lower Falls at 320 feet (98 meters). The total drop is 2,425 feet (739 meters), making Yosemite Falls somewhere around the 5th to 7th highest waterfall in the world.

Yosemite Falls are unique, owing to the extreme drop off of an illogically placed stream channel. It turns out the falls were once flowing down a far less spectacular channel just to the west, but a glacial moraine upstream diverted the original creek to its present-day location.

Royal Arches Cascade

The Royal Arches Cascades plummet about 1,250 feet (381 meters) from the north wall of the valley just west of the arches. They are another ephemeral waterfall seen only in the spring or during rainstorms. They are truly unique in one respect, in that you can easily reach the base of the falls within a short walk of the Ahwahnee Hotel (yes, I know, the "Majestic Yosemite" Hotel, but whatever). The trail, part of the North Valley Loop, takes off from the parking lot, and the base of the falls are just a short scramble up the slope.

Sentinel Falls (left) and maybe Fissure Falls (right)

There are two waterfalls on the south side of Yosemite Valley that are rarely seen by summer visitors to the park, Sentinel Falls (1,920 feet/585 meters), and the falls on the right in the picture above, which may be Fissure Falls, but I am not at all sure. They may not have a name at all (Fissure Falls is an informal name anyway). Sentinel Falls may be the most spectacular waterfall that no one has ever heard of. Can you imagine how famous they would be if they were in any other setting?

Bridalveil Falls

Our short tour of the "seven veils" wouldn't be complete without a feature that actually has "veil" in its name. Bridalveil Fall is often the first waterfall seen by park visitors, being quite obvious from Tunnel View and many other vantage points on the west side of the valley. It drops 620 feet (190 meters from the valley between Cathedral Rocks and Leaning Tower. A short trail from a crowded parking lot leads to near the base of the fall. This time of year, you will get very wet. It didn't matter all that much to my students that day, since they were already wet to start with.

If you visit Yosemite on a rainy day, you are quite likely to miss something. Our students never got a clear view of Half Dome or Ribbon Falls, or the panorama from Tunnel View. But they got to see a different Yosemite, one in which water was pouring everywhere off high cliffs in unnamed waterfalls, and cliffs playing hide and seek with the clouds. It was good enough!

Random Thoughts on Yosemite in Spring

My last couple of posts on Yosemite in springtime followed a theme of some sort, rockfalls or waterfalls and such, but I also just plain saw a lot of beauty derived from the bounty of water at this time of year. The nice thing about a place like Yosemite (and any other kind of park) is the richness of color and texture in features big and small. The picture above is of some redbuds that are still blooming, along with a groundcover teeming with flowers of all kinds.

It was raining prior to our arrival...moisture was everywhere, including the droplets on the clover by the highway where we looked at Grouse Creek Falls. The clouds were moving eastward ahead of us, giving an interesting perspective to the little noticed cliffs around Stanford Point (little-noticed because everyone is looking east to El Capitan, Half Dome, and Bridalveil Fall from the Tunnel View parking lot. It's one of those cases where these cliffs would be world-famous if they were located anywhere else.

Half Dome was putting on a show today, too. This view from the Curry Village parking lot is hard to miss, although I almost always get a telephone wire in the picture. Whose idea was it to string a telephone wire across the view of one of the most iconic rocks in the American West?

Tenaya Creek was running full, and will deserve an entire post of its own in a day or two. The water is strikingly clear, primarily because the watershed above has been stripped almost entirely clean of soil by the glaciers that coursed through the canyon as recently as 13,000 years ago. The water flows over barren rock over much of its course and thus carries relatively little sediment.

One more waterfall to add to the mix. This is Royal Arch Cascade, which tumbles down the canyon wall just west of the Arch. Most people don't see this particular view, as it is a zoom view of just the very top of the waterfall.

It is easily viewed from the parking lot of the Ahwahnee Hotel. We had an appetizer in the bar for the price of a dinner! And it felt worth it...

As we left the valley, we made a brief stop at Valley View, another one of the iconic views of Yosemite just west of the "Gateway", the towering cliffs of El Capitan and Cathedral Rocks. Jet contrails usually screw up pictures of nature, but there seems to be a kind of symmetry to the ones seen here.

Under the Volcano: Changing the Emphasis -Part 7

Yosemite Valley is especially stunning because of the striking number of waterfalls, some justly famous, and a number of others less so due to their ephemeral nature and sometimes just from being a semi-precious stone amongst precious jewels (a beautiful amethyst amongst sapphires, if I can make a bad analogy).

Todays relatively unknown waterfall is another that shows up for just a few months in the spring: Royal Arch Cascades. They are most noticiable through the trees behind the Ahwahnee Lodge on the north side of the valley floor. They form a long, sloping millrace down the cliff, dropping about 1,200 feet, before disappearing into the forest on the valley floor.

I actually find them to be sort of unremarkable from most angles, but it turns out that the base of the falls is very easy to access, and they reveal a beautiful mosiac pattern on the cliffs when viewed from that location. You merely need to follow the trail at the east end of the Ahwahnee Lodge parking lot for a few hundred yards, and then scramble up the talus slope for just a few yards.

The falls spill over a cliff of the Half Dome granodiorite which was intruded around 86 to 88 million years ago. In addition to the requisite feldspar, quartz and biotite, a careful search of the rock will reveal little yellowish crystals of sphene. The rock is relatively free of joints, and this leads to the formation of some interesting reverse exfoliation features at the Royal Arches themselves just to the east of the falls (probably a future post).

Nearly four million people visit Yosemite Valley every year. I doubt that more than a few dozen ever see Royal Arch Cascades from the base. Give it a look!