Thundering Falls

This bend looks like Tahoe. That’s what caught my interest when I saw it — Yellowstone usually leans weird rather than picturesque, and here’s this stretch of river that just quietly does classic mountain-scene beauty instead.

The rock does most of it. The riverbed is scoured clean, nothing left to muddy the water, so what comes back is blue-green; the banks run orange and yellow with lichen; there’s moss, there are lodgepoles standing on stone, and one tree leaning out over the water at an angle that looks like a decision it’s going to regret.

The frame is shot from the brink of the Upper Falls. The water sweeping around the bend in the background is what drew me, but the churn in the lower left is the top of the 109-foot drop, going over.

I kept it at 1/160 rather than smoothing it out. This wasn’t a bit of chop that needed tidying — it was a torrent, and it had genuine violence to it. Freezing it is closer to how it felt to stand there than silk would have been.