A Not To Miss Stop And Go Views of Lower and Upper Yellowstone Falls

Lower Yellowstone Falls

Date: July 19, 2020 and September 30, 2023

Place: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Coordinates of Lower Falls vie at Artist Point:  44.720253, -110.479758

Coordinates of Upper Falls:   44.714266, -110.500847

Length: 0.5 miles each

Level: easy

 

Although I cannot call this a proper hike I still want to include in this blog the accounts of my visit at the Lower Yellowstone Falls during my 2020 road trip with my chikas and their friends and to the Upper Yellowstone Falls last fall with my sister. 

There is a trail that goes down all the way to the top of the Lower Yellowstone Falls and I hiked it on my first visit in Yellowstone with my family, 16 years ago. When I was there with the youth group however, we settled for viewing the falls from Artist Point on the Rim Drive. The viewing deck is less than half a mile from the parking lot.

The first thing we all noticed was how colorful the canyon walls were. The view point we stood at was named "Artist Point" for a good reason!

Yellowstone Canyon, viewed from Artist Point

The Yellowstone River dug itself into a very deep canyon in that place. I didn't look up the geology of that particular area of the park so I don't know what sets it apart from the rest of the river's stretch, where it flows flat. 

Despite the long drought the river was gashing and the waterfall filled the canyon's width. It might not be the highest waterfall I've seen but it was certainly one of the most impressive ones I've seen. 

My chika didn't photograph any birds in that location, but she did bring her camera a long and used her powerful birding lens to take a close up shot of the top of the waterfall.  It was impressive indeed!

Everyone agreed that Yellowstone Falls were indeed an impressive sight. They were okay with not doing the longer walk - there were other places in the park we wanted to still see before leaving it and going on the rest of our crazy and wonderful road trip. 

Naturally, when I visited Yellowstone with my sister last fall I wanted to take her to see Yellowstone Falls as well.  As it was, we too were tight in time so we did only the short walk to the Upper Yosemite Falls. That too was only a short walk from the parking lot to the top of the Upper Falls 

The walk starts downstream of the waterfall. There is no clear view of it there but the misty spray from the falls extends well beyond in. The river itself didn't look very deep downstream of the waterfall.

Yellowstone River

The trail leads right over the top of the waterfall, then descends through a small series of stairs to an observation area closer to the waterfall. We could see the top of the waterfall from above, but there were trees blocking our view. We continued to descend the stairs.

Yellowstone River upstream of the waterfall is very pretty. It actually looks quite tranquil but I know better than to be fooled by its apparent tranquility - the current speeds up as it rushes towards the precipice.

Yellowstone River

We reached quickly the observation area but there we had to wait our turn to get to the prime spot right over the waterfall.

Upper Yellowstone Falls

Nowhere on this trail was a good view of the waterfall face as there was for the Lower Yellowstone Falls. This was a bit of a bummer, but I did lean as far out as I could from the rail of the viewing platform in attempt to get a better view of the falling water. It was pretty impressive and looked very powerful.

Upper Yellowstone Falls

On the easy walk back I took another view of the Yellowstone River upstream of the waterfall. There were a couple of small cascade drops and the difference between the apparent calmness of te water before and after the last step before the waterfall was very clear.

Yellowstone River

 

O)n both my recent trips to Yellowstone, on July 202 and on September 2023 we had limited time and lots to see. Yellowstone Falls was a stop and go kind of place for us. As it was the next and last two sites in Yellowstone Park we the same ones on both of these trips, albeit with different trails. On both trips we continued from Yellowstone Falls to the Mud Volcano basin.