Yosemite Nature Notes - 2 - Yosemite Falls

[Music] Water is asleep when it's in a pond. Water is drowsy when it's in the slow moving river. But when water suddenly notices that the earth has gone away, it wakes up. And so a waterfall is water that has awakened. It has awakened to the reality that it's alive and that it's flowing and that it's moving through the air, and that awakening in the water seems to wake up something in us too. Even lakes and rivers have that sort of draw for people, but it's not that often that you have a river that's free falling through the air. People have always just been attracted to waterfalls all around the world and I think it's because it's not all that often that you see water just pitching through space. When people think of waterfalls, especially here in Yosemite Valley, which has a very high concentration of high waterfalls, they tend to think of facts, they tend to think of Ribbon Fall, the highest single drop of water in North America, around 1,600 feet. They tend to think of Yosemite Falls, 2,425 feet, fifth highest waterfalls in the world. But the numbers don't add up to the beauty of those falls. Every fall has its own unique character, every fall is water saying to the world, look, I can be different over here than I was over there, they have their own personality. There's a lot of different waterfalls in this area, it depends of the time of the year you come here. The ones that are going right now would include Vernal Falls, Nevada Falls, on the Merced River, Bridalveil Falls on Bridalveil Creek, and some other smaller ones, but this one's named Yosemite Falls, it's The Falls. Well, I think it was given the name Yosemite Falls because it's the premier waterfall in Yosemite Valley. Bridalveil is a spectacular waterfall, so are Nevada Falls and Vernal Falls, but they are quite a bit smaller. Yosemite Falls is just right there. I mean, when you kind of turn the corner and you get your first view of it, it's amazing. It's the reason why people park their cars in the middle of the road and get out and start taking pictures, completely oblivious to everything else around them, because it just dominates your attention. I live in Yosemite Valley, I live right underneath the waterfall, and you can bet that I look up at it every single morning when I step out the door, it's impossible not to be drawn to it. People come out here, they're pulled out of their cars, they roll the windows down first, then they can't get out through the window, so they open the door, then they go out the door, and they just start wandering off into the meadow, getting closer to the fall, getting closer to the creek, getting closer to the river, they can't help it. People tend to want to get as close as they can to the edges of waterfalls, I guess to the experience that rush, that energy of the water going from a placid little stream to a raging free falling torrent. People are drawn to waterfalls and sometimes it's hard to know where that limit is as far as how close you are drawn to it. This morning a man asked me, is there a waterfall nearby that I could stick my head under? And you get questions like that sometimes and you have to be very careful how you answer them. I can't tell him, no, you can't stick your head under the waterfall. However, I could say, well, very slippery rocks all around the base and it's a lot of water, it's potentially a very dangerous situation that you might be in. Fortunately, with waterfalls, you know, I think you can get a lot of appreciation from them even from a distance. I mean, here we are, you know, over a mile away and this waterfall is still phenomenal. I remember talking to a visitor here, they asked me about Yosemite Falls and they just said, excuse me, the Ranger, what's up there? I said, I beg your pardon. Well, I'm looking at that fall, what's above the fall? And I said, well, above the fall is the creek. He said, a creek? I said, yeah, a creek, it's a creek that's kind of meandering and that reaches the edge of the Valley and then it becomes a waterfall. If you could imagine being a drop of water in Yosemite Creek, what would you go through before you got to that? Well, first of all, you would be melted snow, maybe around the Mount Hoffman, Tuolumne Meadows area. There are a lot of small little lakes there, there is snow and ice that persists well into the summer in most years, and the melting snow and ice is basically what feeds Yosemite Creek. Yosemite Creek is, you know, it's flowing pretty quickly but it's not a big creek, it's not lot of big waterfalls really and pretty average forested terrain that it's flowing through. And then it kind of turns the corner there and starts heading for Yosemite Valley, and what I always think is neat about Yosemite Creek is that, as it's flowing along gently through that canyon, it has no idea what's ahead of it, you know, it has no idea what it's about to do, which is suddenly and very abruptly reach the rim of Yosemite Valley and pitch off into a waterfall that's nearly 2,500 feet long. When you look at Yosemite Falls, it's a journey; there is a beginning section, there is a middle section, and there is a conclusion. The beginning section is the most dramatic, because that's where you're seeing it fall 1,400 feet from the rim, down to that middle gorge. Once you're in that middle section, the part that I find very interesting is that it disappears. You know what's in there, but you can't really quite clearly see it. So even though that's probably the most photographed waterfalls in North America, there is a section of it that's sort of hidden from view, where it's kind of cutting into a little... into the rock. And then it comes out again, at you, at the Lower Yosemite Fall and falls about another 300 feet and we see that. So we see that lower stretch of 300 feet, we see that upper stretch of 1,400 feet, but there is 600 feet of mystery in there. Over the course of the year, the waterfall changes a lot. In winter, because the flows are low and temperatures are cold, there is a lot of opportunity for water to freeze as it comes over the edge of the falls, and as water goes to its vapor state, as can happen as it gets atomized as it falls, that typically super cools the water and you get ice forming on the cliff, but also at the base of the cliff. And what will happen is, when the sun comes up in the morning and strikes the cliff there at Yosemite Falls, it will start melting that ice and then these big slabs of ice, I mean, tens to hundreds of feet on a side, will come breaking off of the cliff and crashing down to the base of the falls, and they contribute to that big Ice Cone that's developed down there. But in the spring, it starts waking up, and how you can tell that it's waking up is that you hear it really before you see it; there is this increase in volume in the sound of the fall. And that also corresponds to springtime really arriving in full force in Yosemite Valley. So the meadows are green, the trees are leafed out, the dogwoods are flowering. From this point on, the snow pack is melting, it's not accumulating, there is nothing more being added to it. And eventually by late July, into August, these falls will essentially dry up. Come here in the end of August and you probably won't see any water at all. You know, now it's kind of surprising that it runs out of water. So we call it an ephemeral fall, it doesn't run all the time. Once the water has disappeared, you can no longer see it, you can no longer hear it, you can no longer feel its presence. You start forgetting about it and you don't even look over, because you know it's not there, and then there comes a night where there are clouds and there is a little bit of rain, and then you come in the next day, and then there it is. It had been quiet and pretty much dry up there for months, and then that one big rainstorm rejuvenated the waterfall and it was back and it was thundering again even. I was sort of overwhelmed by this presence that was back in my life, you know. It was like this friend of mine had been gone for months and then it has just shown up on the doorstep. It's like, wow, I missed you and I didn't even realize it. Sometimes I think the fall is never more beautiful than when you think it's gone forever. There is the sense that something that has passed away can return, that maybe there is life after death, because something that seems so categorically gone is just there all of a sudden, just overnight.