A Spring Day in Yosemite: Celebrating the Unsung Waterfalls

Springtime in Yosemite! I was there on Sunday, and witnessed the valley at one of the most beautiful times of the year. In the last post, I concentrated on Yosemite's most famous waterfall, Yosemite Falls, especially the Upper Fall. Spring is also a great time to see some of the most spectacular waterfalls in the world that aren't really well known, including the actual highest waterfall in Yosemite Valley. That waterfall would be Ribbon Fall, which drops 1,612 feet, which is nearly 200 feet taller than Upper Yosemite Falls, which only drops 1,425 feet. Ribbon is not as famous because it has a small drainage and thus only flows for part of the year.

The other waterfalls are not well known because they are a bit difficult to see. Silver Strand Fall is a 574 foot fall that suffers because it is best seen from the Wawona Tunnel View, and 99% of the people who stop there are looking at one of the most famous panoramas in the national park system:

Yeah, that one...

Next time, after enjoying the incredible view of the valley, turn 90 degrees to your right, and look up...way up. If it is flowing, it is a pretty waterfall, though it is hard to get a shot with the sun shining on the cliff. Late afternoon probably is the best time to check it out.

I walked a stretch of trail that I have missed in the past, along the Merced River between the Horse Stables and Happy Isles. I looked up and saw a waterfall I've not seen from the valley floor before: 370 foot high Illilouette Fall. This first shot below gives an idea of how tricky it is to see...

Zooming in gives a better idea of the setting, but from this angle there is no clue to how interesting the fall is in a complete view. You have to hike about four miles from Glacier Point to see the best view. I haven't been there yet, but here is a nice shot from someone else.

If you get to Yosemite and you've seen the famous spots, I have a mission for you: find the unsung waterfalls. There are lots more to find: Sentinel, Royal Arch Cascades, Lehamite, Staircase, Horsetail, Widow's Tears, and more that I haven't found out about yet.

To wrap up, I'm tossing in a familiar fall looking a bit less familiar. The wind was blowing across the top of Bridalveil, making the fall look twice as wide as it actually is.

Yosemite is a wonderful place....

A Richness of Waterfalls: A Day at Yosemite in "Spring"...and a Quiz

So, the threatened government shutdown didn't occur, Yosemite National Park didn't close, and our planned field trip took place. 24 of us headed up through Gold Country on our way to the park this morning. The weather was sunny and spring-like as we headed up into the mountains, but despite a perfect weather forecast, by the end of the day we were driving through rain and even snow. No one seemed to mind; I would have justed hated to have missed the sights. I love the place.

One of the luxeries of living near a wonderful place (I'm not gloating, I'm deeply appreciating that I have the access) is that with repeated trips, one gathers a library of thousands of digital images. After the first few trips, the pictures of the iconic features like Half Dome and Yosemite Falls become less imperative, and the photographer's eye wanders to the less-known landmarks, or looks for a new angle to capture the icons in a different way. I noticed that very thing happening today, and at the end of the trip, I found I had amassed a sequence of pictures of Yosemite waterfalls. So I thought I would offer you a bit of a quiz, which some may find hard, and others, especially those who live and work there, might find easy. In any case, the quiz is this:

What waterfalls are these?

The clues: They are in or close to being in Yosemite Valley, or on the Merced River upstream of El Portal. A single waterfall may be shown more than once. Some might be famous. All the pictures were taken today, i.e. a period of rather extreme runoff. I'm not foolish enough to offer a prize for the best score, because I know some of my readers live up there, and know the place a lot better than I do! Number one:

Number two:

Number three:

Number four:

Number five

Number six:

Number seven:

Number eight:

Good luck and happy hunting!

A Day in the Field...Day Backwards On Fun Having, Part One

Another day in the field...today it was our Geology Club. It's not enough that I make my students work hard in the classroom and lab, and drag them on field trip courses. The club members raised the funds to go out on their own and see something new and different. Once again the students led the teacher; I even rode in the back of the van! Yup, backwards day it was, in many different senses.

Strange as it may seem, I had, after twenty-two years in this region, never been to the top of what may arguably be the most famous geologic feature in our immediate vicinity. I've flown over it (a near-future blogpost), driven beneath it countless times, driven over it through a couple of erosional breaches, but I have never stood on top of it. So today I got to check off one more item on my life list: climbing the Stanislaus Table Mountain.

Things were backwards in a number of ways. We found the sweet spot between two powerful storms that are battering California this weekend. Yesterday there was so much snow that Highway 80 had a 45-car chain reaction accident and got closed in both directions. Right now the winds outside are gusting to frightening levels. But for four hours this morning the rain in the foothills let up, and we had a pleasant hike, aside from a bitter cold wind at the top. But instead of a normally hot and arid landscape, we had a muddy trail, rivulets of water everywhere, and waterfalls where waterfalls pretty much never happen (see above).

The trail to the summit starts at the end of Shell Road off of Rawhide Flat Road near the gold rush town of Columbia. "Summit" is not the best term though because Table Mountain is not a single peak at all. It is a flat-topped ridge that winds for many miles through the Sierra foothills. It is composed of a basalt-like volcanic rock called latite, and the lava flow displays some interesting columnar jointing in places (below). The flow is 9 or 10 million years old. How did it get to the top of the ridge? That question will be dealt with at a later time.

The trail crosses gently sloping meadows and oak woodlands for a mile, and then turns and climbs steeply for a half mile to the summit ridge. The ecosystem changes drastically as the trail climbs the north-facing slope. The path is shaded by numerous trees and shrubs, with some unexpected species for a region that regularly reaches 100 degrees in the summertime.

It's a thicket, really, and I'm glad we had a trail to follow instead of bushwacking. The poison oak would have been a real problem! In the picture below one can see the edge of the barren summit ridge.

We passed a glen full of ferns opening up for the first time among the brown husks of last year's crop.

The slope we were climbing was composed of large fallen boulders from the lava flow, a feature called a talus slope. The openings between the boulders can extend hundreds of feet into the slope, and cool moist air will seep out of the slopes all year long. Mosses cover the boulders.

I hope my flower-loving friends will identify the flower for me...I haven't noticed this species before (mind you, I'm a geologist, and flowers are as much a mystery to me as minerals are to botanists). It was fairly common and obvious on the shaded slopes.

We were nearly to the top, and had a close up view of yet another series of small ephemeral waterfalls. A few more switchbacks and we would reach the summit, the "top" of Table Mountain. Our backwards story will continue in the next post!

It's "Where am I Wednesday"!

A glacial valley with rock walls towering thousands of feet above. Waterfalls a thousand feet high. One of John Muir's favorite places.

Challenging cliffs for rock climbers.

So many waterfalls that some are unnamed.

So, where did I spend a good part of my day yesterday?

Aberrations of Nature: A Morality Play and New Meme

There's a new meme in town, started by Outside the Interzone concerning waterfalls we have visited. Like 100 places, it asks of us which waterfalls we have seen, in this case from a North American perspective. The list is as follows, and I'm even going to tell you which ones I have seen, but I have more to say at the end....

#10 Lower Calf Creek Falls, Escalante National Monument, Utah (A wonderful sight in the center of one of our country's most spectacular national monuments)

#9 Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming (A simply spectacular sight from any angle; from the very brink is absolutely mesmerizing)

#8 Upper Whitewater Falls, in southwestern North Carolina (haven't been to NC yet

#7 Snoqualmie Falls, between Snoqualmie and Fall City, Washington (Nope, not yet)

#6 Havasu Falls, Supai Village, Havasupai Indian Reservation, Grand Canyon, Arizona (Not yet, it's on my bucket list)

#5 Shoshone Falls, Twin Falls, Idaho (A spectacular waterfall, but often "turned off" as the river is diverted for irrigation. I got to see it in pre-digital-photography days)

#4 Multnomah Falls, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon (I visited this one as a child, but I was highly impressed at the time and still remember it well)

#3 Bridalveil Fall, Yosemite National Park, California (One of many spectacular falls in one incredible place; if you follow my blog you know I spend a lot of time here)

#2 McWay Falls in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, Big Sur, California (This is one of the most beautiful waterfalls in existence, falling as it does right into the sea, which is one of only two in all of California. If you only follow one link on this post, check out this incredible view)

#1 Niagara Falls, Niagara, New York (nope, not yet, so I never know what anyone is saying when they say "it's twice as high as Niagra")

Waterfalls are an aberration of nature, a temporary interruption in the regular scheme of things, if we are to accept the models of the geomorphologists. Waterfalls don't get much respect from us geologists it seems, since a brief review of the relevant chapters of my textbook reveals little about waterfalls, except as decoration for the chapter cover photos. The chapters I looked at had literally no mention of waterfalls except as deviations from a graded condition.

"Graded"? Rivers adjust their channels in such a way as to remove irregularities by eroding "knickpoints" or depositing sediment within depressions. Following the dictates of physics and gravity, rivers are constantly approaching, but never quite achieving, a graded condition, in which no unusual areas of erosion or deposition exist. Waterfalls are the ultimate deviation, and rivers work furiously over time to remove them. As such, waterfalls truly are temporary, and we are privileged to see the ones that do exist.

This idea of approaching an "ideal" state sounds vaguely like a Victorian morality play in which we as humans seek, but never quite reach, some model of perfection. Scriptural passages speak of the inability of humans to reach a sin-free state without supernatural intervention or grace, and other passages talk of how the mountains will be laid low and the paths made straight. It sounds just like a river adjusting the channel it flows through....

Waterfalls ARE aberrations, and ultimately there is some kind of interesting explanation for why a particular waterfall exists. The river crosses a particularly hard exposure of rock, like a lava flow; glaciers have carved a deep gorge where tributary canyons cannot keep up; water falls off the edge of a plateau with a prominent caprock; a fault has lifted part of a river-course; a landslide has changed the canyon a river flows through.

Part of the waterfall meme allows that we can add one of our favorites; I offer four:

The first photo is Mealt Falls on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. It may be my favorite waterfall on the planet although I have only seen it once and from only one view point. Like McWay Falls at Big Sur, it essentially falls into the ocean. The seacliffs are composed of columnar-jointed basalt flows related to the splitting of Pangea and the opening of the Atlantic Ocean in late Mesozoic time.

The second photo is Akaka Falls on the Big Island of Hawaii. There are hundreds of incredible waterfalls on the Hawaiian Islands, but relatively few on the Big Island, and none as tall as this one, at 442 feet.

The third fall has no name that I have been able to find. I saw it near the town of Bellinzona in the Italian/Swiss Alps, and it left me breathless. It's also my favorite picture of a church!

The final photo is in no way an exciting or particularly beautiful waterfall, and it is only 20 feet tall. It's uniqueness is in the location: in the middle of the hottest, driest desert in the United States. It is called Darwin Falls, and can be found in a remote canyon leading into the Panamint Valley within Death Valley National Park. Somehow the waterfall feels all the more precious, and it is a vital permanent water supply for wildlife from miles around.

Have you got a favorite waterfall? Join the meme! If you feel that waterfalls were under-represented in the 100 places meme of a few months ago, you are also invited to make a contribution to this month's Accretionary Wedge Blog Carnival! Submissions due in a few days!