February 1, 2010

Yosemite Firefall Photography

From firefall.info:

At 9:00 each evening in Camp Curry, the crowd which had gathered for the nightly campfire program, would fall silent. A man would call out to the top of Glacier Point "Let the Fire Fall!", and a faint reply could be heard from the top of the mountain. Then a great bonfire of red fir bark would be pushed evenly over the edge of the cliff, appearing to the onlookers below as a glowing waterfall of sparks and fire. The spectacle was the Yosemite Firefall, a nightly tradition in Yosemite National Park for some 88 years. I witnessed the Firefall myself as a child and still remember it with uncanny vividness.

at 7:21 PM
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14 comments:

  1. http://parkerlab.bio.uci.edu/pictures/photography%20pictures/2008_02_18_Yosemite_forweb/IMG_0269_tweak.jpg

    another good one.
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  2. I understand why they stopped doing it but it must have been amazing. Maybe they could do it like once a year or something now, but as I understand it they don't do it at all anymore.
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  3. Amazing....thanks for passing this on!
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  4. I recall that when, as a boy, I watched the firefall from Camp Curry on Summer nights, someone on the little stage sang "Indian Love Song." It was the pretty Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy version, not the Slim Whitman, alien-head-popping one.
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  5. Watching the Fire Fall was one of the most vivid of my childhood memories
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  6. Great picture. It sounds like it would of been amaizing to watch.
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  7. I lived and worked in Yosemite a couple years ago and they never did this, but people ALWAYS talked about it. I was also there during the really big forest fire that trapped us all in the valley, so I guess a fire waterfall would not be something you'd want to do...
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  8. I was born and raised in Fresno, CA. Lived there for 40 years, my parents use to tell us about the fire falls and I always wished that they would do it again, if only once a year. What an amazing site.
    Thanks for sharing.
    Jan
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  9. Sounds like quite a site!

    I have to wonder how long does it last, and is it a free event to go to?

    If it is, it sounds like it would be great entertainment on the cheap :)
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  10. Hehe "Sounds like quite a site", yeah right, I meant the location... actually not, that was a spelling error... Although it could be taken that way ;)
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  11. I witnessed this gorgeous, amazing site several times as a kid while camping in Yosemite Valley. I don't even think that they allow camping in that part of the Valley anymore, much less have the fire fall. Things have changed.
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  13. I think this photo is not of a fire fall. At a certain time of year, a sliver of the setting sun strikes another cliff in Yosemite and gives this appearance of the famous fire fall. There are only 2 or 3 decent shots on the real thing, the best being from Life Magazine.
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  14. I remember camping with my parents & grandparents in Yosemite in the mid 60's. The Firefall was simply magic & it's hard to image someone wittinessing this and not being touched by it.
    By the way the embers burned out hundreds of feet before reaching the valley's trees & vegetation so it was never a fire hazard.
    I don't see what it would hurt to have Firefalls on summer weekends.
    The Park Sevice did something really hurtful by totally eliminating this historical & emotionally sublime tradition.
    LittleJon
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