Guide to the Natural Yosemite Firefall

Hundreds of photographers gather in Yosemite Valley each year for the natural firefall at Horsetail Fall. Why is it called the Yosemite Firefall?

Back in 1872, the owners of the Glacier Point Hotel created a spectacle by pushing an actual bonfire off the edge of the cliff at Glacier Point. The cascade of red-hot embers falling down the cliff looked like a glowing waterfall of light to onlookers below. Although the practice started and stopped several times over the years, by the mid-1900s thousands of people were coming to Yosemite to literally watch the fire fall. This was the original Yosemite firefall.

Eventually, in January of 1968 the director of the National Park Service, George Hartzog, stopped this practice. This man-made event was obviously inconsistent with the park mission to protect the park’s natural wonders. The huge number of spectators were trampling the meadows, and the concessionaires were having to go further and further afield to find enough of their preferred red fir bark to build the fires. Not to mention the fire hazard it created.

Just 5 years after the Yosemite firefall ended in 1973, a talented adventure photographer named Galen Rowell accidentally stumbled across a new firefall-like phenomenon. As he was driving out of the valley on Southside Drive, he spotted a small waterfall off the shoulder of El Capitan that looked molten in the setting sun. He leaped out of his car and ran to the photograph – the first widely-circulated color picture of the natural firefall in Yosemite National Park.

With the image of the falling bonfire at Glacier Point a recent memory, of course the new natural phenomenon has been dubbed the natural Yosemite firefall.