Regular commenter Thos. and I met for lunch the last time I was out this way, and he suggested that I go to Mesa Falls. I didn’t have time last year, but this trip we got out there. It’s a beautiful volcanic area with a healthy river, Henry’s Fork, that is heavily aerated by the falls. It is therefore rich with life, including fish and the bears that prey on them (the land below is called “Bear Gulch”).
It’s got an upper and lower waterfall, the upper one being less tall but more beautiful.
Thank you for the recommendation, Thos.
When Wallace Stegner was 11 years old, his family camped near upper Mesa Falls. Decades later, he wrote about it in The Sound of Mountain Water:
ReplyDelete"By such a river it is impossible to believe that one will ever be tired or old. Every sense applauds it. Taste it, feel its chill on the teeth: it is purity absolute. Watch its racing current, its steady renewal of force: it is transient and eternal. And listen again to its sounds: get far enough away so that the noise of falling tons of water does not stun the ears, and hear how much is going on underneath--a whole symphony of smaller sounds, hiss and splash and gurgle, the small talk of side channels, the whisper of blown and scattered spray gathering itself and beginning to flow again, secret and irresistible, among the wet rocks."
I enjoy that style of prose, which is rooted in 19th century aesthetics that stretched to the early mid century in America. He was another who benefited from the Boy Scout movement at its height, and learned to love the wild places.
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