Dean M. Chriss
Photography
A Story of Rock and Water, Lower Yellowstone Falls
(Click image to enlarge)
Here the Yellowstone River descends 308 feet (94 meters) over a Rhyolite lava flow that was created 590,000 years ago. The rock is hard but the cold clear water is patient. It slowly wears its way through the huge obstacle as it drains last winter's snow melt and more recent rains from the largest lake above 7,000 feet (2,133 meters) in North America.
This photograph was captured from Uncle Tom's Trail in Yellowstone National
Park very early on an October morning. The trail was was closed temporarily
in 2016 when the National Park Service undertook the project of
renovating all overlooks and trails in Yellowstone's Canyon area. It reopened briefly in 2018 without renovation, and
in 2019 was "closed indefinitely",
which is NPS speak for "permanently". Word from within NPS says that the trail is
being removed from park maps and the name "Uncle Tom's Point" will be
changed to "Upper Falls Viewpoints". I doubt the trail will ever reopen.
In 1898 the Department of the Interior granted "Uncle Tom" H. F. Richardson a
permit to operate a ferry across the Yellowstone River. He ferried park visitors
across the Yellowstone River above the current site of the Chittenden Memorial
Bridge and then escorted them to a steep "trail" constructed from ladders and
ropes that they traveled to the base of the Lower Falls. This trail was known as
"Uncle Tom's Trail". The original trail had rope ladders and 528 steps. The
National park Service has since replaced the trail with steep metal stairs
containing 382 steps that go 3/4 of the way down the side of the canyon to a
viewing platform immediately downriver from the base of Lower Yellowstone Falls.
It was the closest and most dramatic Lower Falls viewpoint, and certainly my
favorite. The image above was digitally captured from
the stairway portion of the trail. Years earlier, before it became impossible to
take photographs from the stairway at the appropriate time, I captured another photograph of the Lower Falls
with a rainbow on Kodachrome film. It can be seen here.
The trail leading to the stairs was always problematic because visitors
refusing to stay on it cause massive erosion of the canyon rim. Further,
the narrow metal stairs that were adequate for decades had become
completely overwhelmed by today's crowds. Updating them would mean replacing
the entire structure with one that could accommodate crowds of today and of the future. Considering the fact that
nearly 5 million people per year currently visit Yellowstone, that's a big deal.
The estimated cost of an appropriate structure is said to be $35 million. Such a massive structure would
degrade views of the canyon from everywhere else and cause considerable
environmental damage in being built. The loss of this trail is a tiny part
of the cost everyone must pay for being collectively too stupid to control
our own numbers. The trail to
Tower Falls met a
similar fate when repairs to meet then current standards, necessitated by a 2012 rock
and mud slide, proved impractical and too expensive.
Even though it is sad, closing these trails is certainly the correct decision.
For trails like these the changes to accommodate today's enormous mobs
of visitors cannot reasonably be made in the delicate surroundings and space
that is available. It's an inevitable
consequence of unbridled population growth. Making the issue
worse is that NPS very often has outdated or inaccurate trail information on
the Yellowstone website. In the case of Uncle
Tom's Trail the National Park Service website announced its October 2018 reopening
without mentioning that the trail closed indefinitely in 2019! Over several decades I have
found that outdated and inaccurate trail information on National Park
Service websites is very common. Accurate and up to date trail status can more
often be
found on websites like AllTrails or
even TripAdvisor. Those websites
often contain information posted by people who believed the NPS website,
went to the trail in question, and found it closed.