Yosemite's Original 'Firefall' Was a Man-Made Cascade of Flaming Coals

For nearly a century, the “firefall” was a highlight of any visit to Yosemite National Park in California. To witness it, crowds gathered in Yosemite Valley as darkness descended, waiting for glowing embers of red fir bark to be raked over the edge of a cliff high above them. Oohs and aahs inevitably filled the air as the embers plummeted in the shape of a flaming waterfall.

“Silently the glowing cascade fans out into a fiery cataract, drifting down in slow majestic motion,” a narrator intones on an old National Park Service video that captures the firefall in action. “For a fleeting moment, its beauty holds you spellbound.”

However, as the environmental movement gathered steam in the 1960s, the firefall was discontinued. Today, an all-natural “firefall” has replaced it on the other side of Yosemite Valley, at a waterfall that gushes over the famed rock formation El Capitan.

White Americans are not known to have entered Yosemite Valley until 1851, when they burned Indigenous villages and forced the survivors onto a reservation that Jen Huntley, author of The Making of Yosemite, compared to a “concentration camp.” “They were hunted down and murdered," Huntley says, "and this was sanctioned by California law.”

Attracted by Yosemite’s immense beauty, including some of the world’s tallest waterfalls, the first tourists began to arrive just a few years later. In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln briefly turned his attention away from the Civil War and signed a bill that preserved Yosemite Valley and a nearby giant sequoia grove for “public use, resort and recreation.” The bill, which placed Yosemite Valley off limits to logging, mining and farming, laid the groundwork for Yosemite to become a national park in 1890, and for other national parks to be established as well.

As Huntley points out, though, it also allowed for entrepreneurs to come into the valley and build hotels, billiard halls, roads and other infrastructure for profit.

“[Yosemite’s creators] were not some kind of far-sighted people who were untainted by the commercial competitiveness of the 19th century,” Huntley says. “They were right in the middle of it.” She adds that pretty much no one “was acting honorably on behalf of the environment,” and that “there was tons of political backbiting and shenanigans going on behind the scenes.”

Ireland-born James McCauley was among those arriving in Yosemite looking to make a buck. He operated a hotel at Glacier Point, as well as a toll trail—which still exists today—connecting Glacier Point with Yosemite Valley. Though the exact details of its origins are somewhat murky, McCauley is believed to have started the firefall as part of a Fourth of July celebration in 1872. Building a fire at Glacier Point, which stands some 3,200 feet above Yosemite Valley, McCauley pushed the embers over the cliff edge once it got dark.

Huntley suspects that McCauley might have been burning trash, as was customary at the time. “And then someone down below was like, ‘That was really cool. Do that again,’” Huntley says. Eventually, people began paying to view the spectacle. Adding to the allure, a sign warned visitors of the sheer cliff at Glacier Point, with “no undertaker to meet you” at the bottom.

When McCauley’s lease expired in 1897, he was forced to leave the hotel and abandon the firefall. But it was soon revived by David and Jennie Curry, who founded Camp Curry in 1899 (at the site of present-day Curry Village). This was before they attempted (and failed) to build a Yosemite Valley golf course and dam Yosemite’s waterfalls. “If [David] Curry didn’t invent the firefall, he’s definitely the person who made the firefall a draw,” Huntley says.

Under the Curries, and continuing after David’s death in 1917, the firefall became a daily event in summer, and a regular event at other times of year. In the late afternoon, a bonfire of red fir bark—which supposedly produced the best embers—was lit atop Glacier Point. By 9 p.m., when the firefall occurred, it had turned into a massive pile of red coals.

From Yosemite Valley, David Curry or another host would yell up, “Hello Glacier Point, is the fire ready?” The so-called fire master, perched atop the cliff edge, would reply, “The fire is ready.” The host would then say, “Let the fire fall,” prompting the coals to be raked over Glacier Point and onto the granite ledges far below.

In later years, as the cascade of fire tumbled down, visitors at Camp Curry would sing the “Indian Love Call,” a tune from a Broadway musical. The song “America the Beautiful” was incorporated into the proceedings as well, along with a variety of additional entertainment.

The firefall proved so popular that it appeared on Yosemite postcards as well as in the 1954 film The Caine Mutiny, starring Humphrey Bogart. An agricultural company put the firefall on its fruit labels, and President John F. Kennedy once watched it, perhaps the only time it was delayed past 9 p.m. to accommodate his schedule.

Of course, some people realized it might not be the best idea to hurl burning coals off a cliff in a fire-prone area. Moreover, with all those bonfires, it became harder to gather red fir bark around Glacier Point. Down below in the valley, the rush of visitors was destroying Yosemite Valley’s fragile meadows. “They couldn’t manage the flow of people, [many of whom] just drove their cars straight onto the meadows and parked there,” Huntley says.

When George Hartzog Jr. became director of the National Park Service in 1964, he resolved to eliminate the firefall, believing it was more fit for an amusement park than a national park. “It was a spectacular sight, but as appropriate to the majesty of Yosemite Valley as horns on a rabbit,” Hartzog wrote in a memoir. The last firefall took place, to little fanfare, on January 25, 1968. As part of the park service’s changing ethos, it likewise stopped feeding bears around that time.

Over its nearly 100-year history, the firefall is not known to have caused any major forest fires. But unused fir bark, gathered for the firefall, did purportedly help fuel a blaze that burned down the Glacier Point Hotel in 1969.

Ironically, at the same time government officials were promoting the firefall at Yosemite, they were suppressing fire everywhere else, a strategy that ultimately led to wildfires becoming more severe. “They just bought hook, line and sinker the idea that all fire was bad all the time,” Huntley says.

In 1973, photographer Galen Rowell captured an image of Horsetail Fall, which cascades down El Capitan, glowing neon orange in the setting sun. This kick-started a new phenomenon also known as the “firefall.” Visible for only one to five minutes each afternoon for around two weeks in February—that is, if skies are clear and the waterfall is flowing—it too has become immensely popular. In a National Park Service video, one photographer said the waterfall “lights up like someone put makeup on it,” while another said it looks like lava.