Location Taken: Idaho Falls, Idaho
Time Taken: June 2010
I’m tired of mountains, time for waterfalls!
This one’s so lovely, they named the town after it.
Though that’s actually fairly common. Towns had a strong tendency to pop up around waterfalls, back in the days when water power and travel were the way things were done. If you took a boat on the river, you had to either stop at the waterfall and go around it, or take things very slow and go over it. This created a natural rest spot, which is just the sort of thing that grows into a town. Meanwhile, that same waterfall is a perfect setup for waterwheels and turbines and all the lovely ways to put together water and gravity and make use of it. And well, if the waterfall is that important, you’re going to keep referring to it when you talk about the area and oh look you have a name.
…Feel like I’ve mentioned that before. Oh well!
Long waterfalls like this one are especially interesting. Basic rule of water is that it finds the lowest spot and flows down it. So why are there so many low spots here?
Well, if you look closely, you can see that the waterfall is at an angle to the river. Just a quirk of how the rock lies, but an important one. The water all the way on the left encounters the edge first, and falls. But the water left of that, what can it do? It can’t go right, there’s water in the way, perhaps forward a little- and it falls. Keep that up across the whole width of the river and you end up with a waterfall far wider than it is tall.
Though, really, should it count as one waterfall? There’s lots of small falls there all working together… Eh, that’s just semantics. Five waterfalls for the price of one!
