The Yosemite National Park is enlivened and splendidly enriched with
mountain-high waterfalls and with wildly coasting and cascading
streams. These world-famous falls gain an added attractiveness through
the magnificence of the walls over which they plunge. In places the
walls, clean-cut and smooth, rise sheer for more than one thousand
feet. Here and there the line of a wall is broken with a vast niche or
columnar buttress.
A number of mountain streams and rivers in the Yosemite deliberately
make their way to the brink of a vast gorge that has its brow in the
sky, and there, in full self-control, they plunge over.
Jutting rocks, and smooth steep inclines throw streams into wild,
uncontrolled excitement. But where a vertical river drops its
fluttering current against a magnificent mountain-wall, everything is
harmonious and controlled, and the stream appears to have the sublime
composure of a Big Tree.
In a stream-channel water goes forward with crowding intermittent
rushes. These, in plunging over a brink, break up into numerous
closely falling rockets or comet-like masses, each tailed with spray.
These in turn separate and divide into other such masses, with spray
and water-dust.
[Illustration: UPPER AND LOWER YOSEMITE FALLS
Total fall 2600 feet]
In a drop of several hundred feet a mass of water is likely to expand
to several times its width at the brink. This expansion varies with
the volume of water, the height of the drop, and the direction and
speed of resisting wind-currents.
Swaying and bending are further attractions of waterfalls. Bridal Veil
Falls often swings and sways gently from side to side. This movement
is sometimes accompanied by lacy flutterings at one or more places on
the spray-wreathed white fall. Numerous falls in the Yosemite are high
and spread widely in descending, and frequently the fall dances
splendidly as its white, airy mass keeps time to the changing
movements of the wind.
Many of these high falls are accompanied at times by a fluttering of
numerous rainbows. These flaunt, shift, and dart like great
hummingbirds. At the Lower Yosemite, Bridal Veil, and Vernal Falls
these rainbows sometimes momentarily form a complete circle of color.
By these, too, the moon produces similar though softer, stranger
effects. Perhaps the most pleasing, delicate, and novel effects in
lunar rainbows are to be had about the foot of Yosemite Falls.
The slender Ribbon Fall has a vertical drop of twenty-three hundred
feet; the Upper Yosemite, about sixteen hundred feet. Nevada Falls is
about six hundred feet high. Vernal Falls is one hundred feet wide at
the top and drops three hundred feet. The Vernal and Nevada Falls are
in the midst of magnificent and novel rock scenery. The Illilouette
Fall is about six hundred feet high and is one of the most beautiful
in the Park.
The Tueeulala and Wapama Falls in Hetch-Hetchy have their own
individual setting and behavior. The Wapama, though lacking the
verticality of the Upper Yosemite Falls, carries a greater volume of
water. Yosemite Creek is a true mountain stream. In its first ten
miles it goes through a number of zones, passes a variety of plant
life, and makes a descent of six thousand feet. One third of this
descent is in the Falls of the Yosemite.
John Muir tells us that one windy day the Upper Falls was struck by an
upward wind pressure that bent and drove the water back over the brow
of the cliff. The wind held back the water so that the fall was cut
entirely in two for a few minutes. But more wonderful than this was
one day when the wind struck the Upper Falls at a point about halfway
down and there stopped and supported its falling waters. For more than
a minute the water piled up in an enormous conical accumulation about
seven hundred feet high. All the while the water poured over steadily
from above, and the entire mass rested upon the elastic but invisible
air. Then came a wild collapse.
At the foot of some of these waterfalls vast ice-cones are sometimes
formed. Occasionally these spread out over a large area and rise to
the height of several hundred feet.
Among the numerous cascades in the Park, one of the most precipitous
is the Sentinel, which endlessly comes tumbling down over a steep
rough incline of thirty-two hundred feet. In the upper end of the
Tuolumne Cañon the Tuolumne River rushes over inclined rocks and forms
one of the most scenic rapids in the world.