The Magic of Hiking to Yosemite’s Waterfalls

By Michael Lanza

My seven-year-old daughter, Alex, is engaged in some heavy intellectual lifting. I can tell by the way she stares quietly, her brow knitted in thought, at Upper Yosemite Falls. We’ve hiked for 90 minutes up a thousand vertical feet of hot, dusty trail above Yosemite Valley to stand below this curtain of water that plunges a sheer 1,430 feet off a cliff, ripping through the air with a sound like fighter jets buzzing us.

I can only imagine how it challenges her young sense of perspective. I was an adult when I first saw Yosemite Falls, the tallest in North America at 2,425 feet, consisting of the upper falls in front of us, several hundred feet of cascades below it, and 400-foot-tall Lower Yosemite Falls, out of sight far below us. It awed me then, as it still does. But I’m wondering what it looks like to the eyes of a seven-year-old.

Finally, Alex asks me, “How does the water go up the mountain?”

Correction: I could not imagine her perspective—I sure didn’t anticipate that question, anyway. But after she utters it, it strikes me as a perfectly logical inquiry for someone who hasn’t conceptualized that uphill from this liquid tower, beyond sight, sprawls a high country of forest and meadows. Up there, an exceptionally deep snowpack from the past winter and spring continues melting well into summer, feeding Yosemite Creek and this waterfall. To Alex, the water appears to materialize inexplicably from the top of this cliff.

 

We are on a family trip to Yosemite Valley to hike to some of the most spectacular waterfalls on the continent—and we’ve come in early summer, when mountain snowmelt fattens them up so much that they create something like a very localized rainstorm, even on a sunny day. Besides Alex and me, our three-generation party consists of my nine-year-old son, Nate, my 12-year-old nephew, Marco, my wife, Penny, and my 73-year-old mom, Joanne, who hiked to these same waterfalls with me 15 years ago.

First, like good tourists, we warmed up with short walks to some of the sights that make the Valley special. We scrambled to the banks of the Merced River in the lower end of the Valley, where the river is a perpetual thunderclap of foaming whitewater coursing around boulders the size of SUVs. And we walked to Vista Point below Bridalveil Falls, getting showered by mist.

Upper Yosemite Falls.
Upper Yosemite Falls.

At nearly eight miles round-trip with 2,700 feet of vertical ascent, we knew the dayhike to the brink of Upper Yosemite Falls would test the endurance of some of our party. (On the park shuttle bus to the trailhead, the driver, upon hearing our plans, had made a point of walking to the back of the bus to warn us against trying to take young kids all the way up the Upper Yosemite Falls Trail. We thanked the driver and ignored her advice—preferring to think that our reaction says more about our kids’ abilities as hikers than it says about our judgment as parents.)

And indeed, we didn’t start hiking until noon—a long story that basically boils down to the fact that Yosemite Valley is one of the most popular and crowded destinations in America. So now we’re laboring uphill in blazing heat, and I’m receiving a lot of blowback from certain small people complaining about being tired, hot, and hungry.

But that first view of Upper Yosemite Falls begins to spin our little group’s collective morale 180 degrees. Revived by snacks and scenery, and dazzled by the waterfall’s mist raining onto us out of a blue sky, the kids pick up enthusiasm and speed. Yosemite Valley gradually slips farther below us, until the big trees down there look less like a forest than a neat supermarket display of broccoli crowns. And after about four hours of climbing, we tiptoe along a narrow catwalk of steps blasted out of the cliff face to a broad ledge, with a railing, at the top of the waterfall. There, we peer transfixed over the dizzying brink, watching Yosemite Creek leap off a cliff with a force many times that of a fire hose and disperse in a curtain of water falling through a quarter-mile of air.


Hi, I’m Michael Lanza, creator of The Big Outside. Click here to sign up for my FREE email newsletter. Join The Big Outside to get full access to all of my blog’s stories. Click here for my e-guides to classic backpacking trips. Click here to learn how I can help you plan your next trip.


Born in snow at up to 13,000 feet in Yosemite’s backcountry, the upper Merced River—just that stretch of the young river upstream from Yosemite Valley—drains an area of the park encompassing about 182 square miles, the approximate equivalent of 140 Central Parks. Not many rivers drop as steeply as the upper Merced, which plunges 8,000 feet within just 24 miles. Over the river’s three and a half miles right before it levels out upon entering the Valley, it tumbles 1,880 feet through a geologic wonder known as the Giant Staircase, including two sheer drops: 594 feet over Nevada Fall, and 317 feet over Vernal Fall.

Not surprisingly, the loop dayhike on the Mist and John Muir trails to those two waterfalls is one of the most popular in America.

Because getting an early start to beat the crowds is as easy with children as crushing granite with your bare hands, we start up the Mist Trail in late morning, when the flow of hikers seems almost as heavy as the Merced’s whitewater torrent paralleling the path. We weave around slow-hiker jams, thinking this feels like a strange cross between a walk in nature and Black Friday at the mall. But the kids don’t seem to mind the hordes too much.

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And having been up this trail a few times, I want them to experience it. Fifteen years ago, when my mom and I hiked it during a June of unusually high runoff, it was all we could do to struggle uphill through the monsoon hitting the trail from the colossal force of Vernal Fall smashing onto the rocks at its base: We just put our heads down, rain jacket hoods up, shielded our faces with an arm, and plowed through.

Today, true to the Mist Trail’s name, we walk through a light shower from Vernal Fall. Energized by this phenomenon of rain materializing from sunshine, Marco, Alex, and Nate scamper upward as quickly as they can high-step up the trail’s large granite blocks. I hustle to stay on their heels. The sunlight through the mist launches a rainbow arcing down-canyon from the foot of the waterfall. At one point, Nate turns to me with a wide grin and gushes, “I can see why they call this the Mist Trail!”

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8 thoughts on “The Magic of Hiking to Yosemite’s Waterfalls”

  1. My favorite place in the world! When I was coming out of anesthesia after knee surgery 20 years ago, I was dreaming/hallucinating my recent hike up to Vernal & Nevada Falls. Not surprisingly, I did not want to wake up!

    Question: Have you ever been to Yosemite in November?

    Reply
    • No, I have been to Yosemite several times, but only in summer and fall. I’m going back again later this summer.

      Reply