The Manufactured Fall and the Real One

From eighteen seventy-two to nineteen sixty-eight, every summer evening in Yosemite, a crowd gathered on the valley floor and looked up at Glacier Point, the overlook visible from the valley at seven thousand two hundred fourteen feet. At nine in the evening, a signal went up. Burning embers were pushed off the cliff, falling nine hundred feet in a river of sparks and glowing ash that spectators below described as a waterfall of fire.

James McCauley, who operated a hotel at Glacier Point, started the practice. The Curry Company, which became the valley's principal concession operator, continued it and built an audience for it over the following decades. At the height of its popularity, the Yosemite Firefall was the primary reason many visitors came to the valley in the summer. The announcement from a ranger at the valley floor, calling up to Glacier Point to let the fire fall, and the response from the rim, became a ceremonial ritual of the Yosemite experience.

The NPS ended it in nineteen sixty-eight. It was a commercial entertainment built inside a national park, and the agency decided it had tolerated the anomaly long enough.

Now, for approximately two weeks in mid-to-late February, when conditions are right, Horsetail Fall on El Capitan glows in the sunset light and draws crowds larger than the Firefall ever managed. The NPS issues advisories. The parking fills hours before sunset.

The manufactured version ran for ninety-six years. The natural version has been occurring since El Capitan was exposed by glaciers, somewhere between fifteen thousand and thirty thousand years ago.