Firefall

The Work

What looks like fire is not fire.

For roughly two weeks in mid-February, the setting sun in Yosemite Valley reaches an angle where its last light passes through a narrow gap and strikes the eastern face of El Capitan — and only the eastern face — at the precise moment Horsetail Fall is running with snowmelt. If the sky is clear, if the snowpack has been generous, and if the wind doesn’t lift the water off the cliff, the fall lights up for about ninety seconds at sunset. To the eye it reads as molten orange against black granite. It is, in fact, white water lit by red light against shadowed stone. The photograph is a record of a coincidence.

I worked the same viewpoint over multiple winters before I made an image I was willing to keep. Most evenings the conditions fail in one of three ways: cloud cover blocks the sunset, the snowpack is too low to feed the fall, or the wind dismantles the water column. Successful Firefall is rare — perhaps one to three usable evenings in a normal year.

Firefall is what photography occasionally permits: a moment where the camera sees what the place is doing once, and never again the same way.

The Location

Yosemite National Park, California. The vantage point is the eastern side of El Capitan Meadow, looking up at Horsetail Fall, a 1,570-foot two-tiered seasonal waterfall that descends the southeast face of El Capitan. The fall only runs in winter and spring; it is dry the rest of the year.

The phenomenon was widely documented after Galen Rowell’s 1973 publication of the first colour photograph of the event. Access to the primary viewpoints has been managed by reservation since 2019. The image was made within the legal permitted viewing area.

The Edition

Signature Series. Edition of 15, hand-signed and numbered. Each acquisition is accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity with hologram provenance seal, including date of capture. Edition 15 of 15 available.

The Capture

The Print

Firefall is one of the most demanding subjects in landscape photography to print. The fall itself sits within a stop of paper-white, in pure saturated orange. The surrounding cliff sits within a stop of pure black. There is almost no midtone in the composition — the eye reads it as fire because the dynamic range is exactly that of an actual flame.

Printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm with archival carbon pigments, the orange holds its saturation without burning the highlight, and the granite shadow keeps its texture rather than collapsing to flat black. The vertical format — 2:3 native aspect — rewards framing with a wide off-white mat and a deep matte black hardwood frame. For statement placements, this image performs unusually well face-mounted to acrylic, where the high contrast reads from a distance.