Scores of Waterfalls Discovered in Yellowstone

It began more than five years ago as a simple personal challenge: Visit each of the 50 or so known waterfalls in Yellowstone National Park and look for others missing from park maps.

“We would have been thrilled to find three or four waterfalls that had never been documented before,” says Paul Rubinstein, who began stalking waterfalls during time off from a summer job in the park gift shops.

Rubinstein and fellow waterfall hunters Lee Whittlesey and Mike Stevens have since documented and named nearly 230 Yellowstone waterfalls never before mapped, named, photographed or described, a feat of exploration rare in the modern world, especially in a national park visited by more than 3 million people each year.

Along the way they ran into grizzly bears, were struck by lightning and happened onto a remote and rugged section of the park so laden with towering waterfalls they named it “Valhalla” after the lofty realm of Norse mythology.

The modern-day Corps of Discovery tell the story of their quest and describe the approximately 280 waterfalls now known in the park in a new book, “The Guide to Yellowstone Waterfalls and Their Discovery,” due out in July from Westcliffe Publishers.

In 320 pages and more than 200 photographs, the book contains what may be one of the greatest records of geographical discovery in Yellowstone since the first reports of the surveys that probed the geyser-filled wilderness before the turn of the century.

Some park veterans fear the book gives away the very secrets that make Yellowstone such a wondrous place to explore, but others see it as an engaging reminder of how much remains to be found even in an age of Global Positioning System technology.

“The people who were credited with the discovery of Yellowstone and its main features all came over a relatively short period of a few years just before and after it became a park,” says Judith Meyer, an assistant professor of geography at Southwest Missouri State University and an authority on the park’s geographical history who wrote the foreword for the waterfall book. “It’s been 125 years, and nothing this big has come out of the park since then.”

The newly documented waterfalls include many of the tallest and most spectacular in Yellowstone, although few rival the dimensions of the well-known Upper and Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River. The number of falls in Yellowstone may surpass the total found in Yosemite National Park, which is famous for its waterfalls.

The new book’s three authors and others who searched out Yellowstone’s falls with them coined names they hope reflect the character of each one.

Citadel of Asgard Falls, for instance, plunges 150 feet into a rocky amphitheater before cascading hundreds of feet farther. Rapunzel Falls dives at least 400 feet and wins its name from its resemblance to the golden hair of the fairy-tale maiden. Zephyr Falls, 300 feet high, weaves elegantly in the slightest wind. Stone Hollow Falls drops through a crevice in a cliff.

And the book’s authors doubt they have found all of Yellowstone’s watery wonders.

“At the beginning it seemed like every time we went out looking for a waterfall we’d heard about somewhere, we’d find three more we had never heard about,” says Stevens, a high school math teacher in California who works summers in Yellowstone as a tour guide. “I’m convinced the park is still teeming with undiscovered waterfalls, but they’re even more difficult to access.”

During his first summer in Yellowstone, in 1979, Stevens heard a ranger discuss the park’s waterfalls and decided he would like to see as many of them as he could. In 1989 Rubinstein joined him, and on their days off, they searched out little-known falls.

A few years later, Rubinstein and Stevens ran into Whittlesey, Yellowstone’s official archivist, who had already begun work on a book encompassing the some 50 falls he had identified from park maps and historical records. The three joined forces, with Whittlesey compiling the written descriptions of waterfalls and Rubinstein and Stevens photographing them.

Then in 1995, while poring through the park archives, Rubinstein began finding mentions of “barriers” to fish migration that sounded suspiciously like waterfalls. He took it as a hint that many more unmapped falls might be lurking in the park’s back country.

“I said, ‘There may be a lot more out there that we could include in the book if you guys wanted to,’ ” Rubinstein recalls.

The three agreed to delay the book while they investigated their new leads. In 1996, which they now call a “year of discovery,” they found more than 20 waterfalls never before mapped or photographed. They lengthened the list in successive years, including only falls at least 15 feet high.

“Almost none of these falls appeared on maps and many of them had not been written about or photographed,” Whittlesey says. “It’s hard to describe the feeling of rounding a corner and seeing a 100-foot beauty that hadn’t been written about before.”

They hiked hundreds of miles on and off trails in search of the waterfalls, walked up on grizzly bears (without incident) three times, stepped through thin crusts into near-boiling mud and clung to steep rock faces to photograph waterfalls. Rubinstein was struck by lightning.

“My legs were kind of sore for a few days afterwards,” he says.

Needless to say, the authors do not recommend trying to visit all of the waterfalls in their book--and they strongly discourage visiting some, such as Realm of the Dead Falls, accessible only amid the steep slopes and high water of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

“A fall of hundreds of feet or drowning in the Yellowstone River could be the results of attempting to reach Realm of the Dead Falls,”’ the three write in their book. “After that, the name of the place would have more real meaning than you probably want.”

The book’s description of each waterfall includes a rating of its accessibility, ranging from those accessible “by virtually all visitors with little difficulty” to those where “very real and extreme dangers exist to the hiker.” One of the easiest of the newfound falls to reach is Confirmation Falls, a 75-foot plunge less than two miles from the park’s south entrance road.

But the simple fact that most of the waterfalls lie far off the beaten track probably helped keep them hidden from most park visitors, who rarely venture beyond established roads and trails. Even the early surveys that mapped Yellowstone’s geyser basins and other wonders just before and after the park’s establishment in 1872 stuck to prominent river corridors.

“Most surveys didn’t go up side streams, and most of these waterfalls are up side streams,” says Whittlesey.

The book’s three authors don’t claim they are the first to see all of the waterfalls described for the first time in their book--although in a few cases they may be, since they deliberately searched otherwise dead-end canyons for falls.

Because they are first to formally map and identify the falls, however, tradition holds that they can also name otherwise unnamed falls, which they have done, pulling often fanciful titles from mythology and fairy tales.

“We tried really hard for the names to sound magical or enchanting,” said Whittlesey, an authority on Yellowstone names and the author of the book “Yellowstone Place Names.”

There are Fall of the Valkyries, Sweetwater Falls and Elysian Falls, Leaping Falls and Dashing Falls.

Publication of new names in a book is generally sufficient to make them official, with two major exceptions, says Roger Payne, executive secretary of the U.S. Board of Geographic Names, the national arbiter of official place names. Places cannot be named after people dead less than five years, and no new names can be applied within designated or proposed wilderness areas unless they are necessary for safety and educational reasons.

Since much of Yellowstone is proposed wilderness, the Board of Geographic Names may not formally adopt many of the names in the new waterfall book, he says.

But that does not mean hikers and other park visitors will not use the names anyway, Whittlesey notes.

“If we don’t name them, someone else will,” he says. “We have every right to name them, just as the world has every right to ignore us.”

John Lounsbury, Yellowstone’s Lake district ranger, hopes the world does ignore them. He laments that the book, by unveiling some of Yellowstone’s special nooks and crannies, robs others of the thrill of discovering those same places for themselves.

“Part of the charm of Yellowstone is that not every feature back there has a name,” Lounsbury says.

Yellowstone spokeswoman Marsha Karle acknowledges divided feelings among park staff about highlighting waterfalls that may lie in fragile and remote regions of the park.

“We tend to be a little protective of the park and these secret and sacred places,” she says. “It’s hard to predict what people will do with the information in the book. These are truly spectacular places that few people have ever seen, and the book itself is a way for people to see them.”

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On the Net:

About the book:

https://www.westcliffepublishers.com/books/national_parks/yellowstone.htm

Photos from the book:

https://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/ Trails/6171/hiddenwaterfalls.html