Yosemite Falls Spring
— — what the snowpack does on the way down.
Not only on a wall.
“The tallest waterfall in North America, on the north wall of Yosemite Valley, fed entirely by snowmelt off the high country above. The drop runs in three sections: the Upper Fall at fourteen hundred and thirty feet, the Middle Cascades, then the Lower Fall onto the valley floor. The flow peaks in May, when the high meadows are losing the last of the winter, and by August the falls are usually a trickle and sometimes dry to the rock. The spring sound carries down the valley. You can hear the water from Yosemite Valley Lodge, a mile and a half away. On full-moon nights in April and May, the mist at the base throws a lunar rainbow, an effect John Muir wrote about over a century ago.
Yosemite Falls Spring, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Yosemite Falls drops from the north wall of Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park, in Mariposa County, California, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. The total drop of 2,425 feet from the lip of the Upper Fall to the valley floor makes it the tallest waterfall in North America and among the twenty tallest in the world. The base of the Lower Fall sits at about four thousand feet of elevation; the lip of the Upper Fall is at roughly six thousand five hundred. The valley is reached on California Highway 140 from Merced, Highway 41 from Fresno, and Highway 120 from the west. The closest park lodging is Yosemite Valley Lodge, an easy walk from the base of the Lower Fall.
Yosemite Falls is fed entirely by Yosemite Creek, which drains a high basin above the north rim of the valley and has no glacier or large lake to even out the flow. As a result the falls run hardest from April through June, when the Sierra snowpack melts fast; they often slow to a trickle by July and run dry by late August. The drop is split into three named sections: Upper Yosemite Fall at 1,430 feet, the Middle Cascades at about 675 feet of stair-stepped chutes, and Lower Yosemite Fall at 320 feet onto the valley floor. The National Park Service measures discharge at a stream gauge on Yosemite Creek above the Upper Fall, where peak May flows have exceeded 2,400 cubic feet per second in heavy snow years.
Spring is the season the falls were named for. Peak runoff from the Sierra snowpack arrives between mid-April and mid-June, with the highest sustained flow in May. By mid-July the discharge drops sharply, by August the falls are usually thin or silent, and by September Yosemite Creek above the lip is often a chain of pools rather than a stream. A full moon falling during peak runoff, in April or May, can produce a lunar rainbow in the spray at the base of the Lower Fall, an effect John Muir described in his 1912 book The Yosemite. The Lower Yosemite Fall Trail is paved and open through the year, a one-mile round-trip loop from the shuttle stop at the Yosemite Valley Lodge.