Falling off Mountains

14 Feb 2025

Yosemite is all about falling. Water falling off a mountain, Sara pushing Cory off a mountain, etc. So today's post will be all about the falls we saw.

Yosemite for us was also about Cory falling under Sara's spell. It took less than 100 ft into the hike to Yosemite Lower Falls for Sara to find mistletoe and get Cory under it. (Yes, she did get a kiss, no we aren't posting it 😋)

We traveled a little bit north to catch our first glimpse of the falls.

They'd been logging in the area, and somehow managed to wedge a felled tree between a set of three on the way down.

The creek leading from the falls was almost entirely frozen, but the streams that were still flowing were flowing way too fast to freeze up.

As we approached the falls, it was making rainbows again!

We carried on away from the falls as the crowd grew and found some more great views of both the lower and upper Yosemite Falls.

We tried catching Firefall again, but we were worried about some of the clouds rolling in.

We still settled in for a wait, hoping for some interesting weather.

Unfortunately, the clouds started falling off the mountain right over Horsetail Falls.

But that's okay, we decided the next day that if the clouds were going to come in the afternoon, we'd beat them up to Columbia Rock with great overlooks of the breadth of the valley. We just had to be careful to not fall off the mountain.

Up and up we climbed, finally reaching a spot where it really opened up.

Halfway up and Cory is wondering when we'd reach the top.

But there was much more height to go for us. Our legs were burning, we were getting dizzy in the thin air, one step from imminent doom.

But we made it!

Now we just had to make it back down, and that view was even more daunting at parts. Our legs were aching. Sara's bad knee was acting up, and Cory had overused his knees as well. They were still hurting days later.

We had one more set of falling to see though, Bridalveil Falls. This is an easy, half-mile hike to see the falls. But as luck would have it, the brochure assumed we'd be driving to the parking lot instead of taking the shuttle bus that drops you off 1.8 miles away...

So we went for a lovely little walk down the road. On the way we saw Ribbon Falls and got great views of El Capitan.

Eventually, Cory decided to have an unauthorized snack.

To be fair, he really picked up the pace after the snack.

We finally arrived at the falls, and it was glorious seeing it drop along the cliff face, building up ice and snow. It would occasionally break off as well, crashing down and thundering.

Alright, that's enough falling, next time we'll get into the most important sights we saw in Yosemite: Birds