Shoshone Falls: The Niagara of the West
Near Twin Falls, Idaho
The Snake River drops two hundred twelve feet over Shoshone Falls, forty-five feet higher than Niagara. The falls spread across a basalt rim roughly one thousand feet wide, and before irrigation diversions began tapping the river, the roar carried ten miles across the high desert plain. Nineteenth-century travelers called it the Niagara of the West, and the name stuck.
The falls exist because of a cataclysm that ended fourteen thousand years ago. An enormous prehistoric lake called Lake Bonneville once covered much of the Great Basin, stretching across what is now Utah and Nevada. Around fourteen thousand five hundred years ago that lake breached at Red Rock Pass in southern Idaho and unleashed a flood of staggering scale, roughly fifteen hundred times the average annual flow of the Snake River. That torrent carved the Snake River Canyon and scoured the basalt plain, but it could not cut through an older, harder layer of rhyolite underlying the canyon. Shoshone Falls marks the point where the river hits that resistant rock, creating a natural ledge that has persisted ever since.
For thousands of years the falls marked the upper limit of salmon migration in the Snake River. The Shoshone and Bannock peoples gathered here each spring when fish ran thick, using the natural ledge as a weir to harvest salmon before the cascade blocked their path upstream. The site was a meeting place, a food cache, and a trade hub at the edge of two worlds: the salmon country below and the bison and root country of the high desert above.
European and American travelers began arriving in the eighteen sixties, and some journalists declared Shoshone Falls superior to Niagara in raw drama. The railroad brought sightseers from across the country. But irrigation projects upstream in the twentieth century steadily siphoned water into the surrounding farmland, and today the falls shrink to a trickle through most of the summer. The best time to see them at full strength is spring, usually April through June, when snowmelt from the mountains briefly restores something close to the original spectacle.
