Yosemite Falls

As you near the top of the 4-Mile Trail, the view of the middle cascades gets obscured by rock, but the scale of the view makes it even more spectacular than the view from the lower part of the trail. From here, you can see not just the falls, but miles beyond them to Yosemite's northern country; somewhere in the vicinity of the horizon, the Tioga Road winds its way east towards Tenaya Lake, Tuolumne Meadows, and other of Yosemite's lesser known lights. Even though you're a mile and a half (2.5 km) away from them here, the falls will be plainly audible during the spring runoff.

It's hard to understand the scale of the falls from looking at a photograph, but we're never reluctant to provide some perspective, so: consider New York's Chrysler Building. At its completion, it was the tallest building in the world, and it's still the tallest brick building. At 319 feet (97 meters) tall, it's a foot shorter than the lower fall - that's right, the lower fall alone - which is about a centimeter high on your computer screen.

The 102-story Empire State Building, which surpassed the Chrysler as the world's tallest when it was finished, would reach about to the big bowl of spray at the bottom of the upper fall. If you stacked two Empire State Buildings on top of each other at the base of the falls, the people four floors from the top (the ones who'd pressed the button for the 200th floor) would be eye to eye with the hikers at the upper falls overlook. King Kong, at 25 feet (7.5 meters) tall, would be less than 1/10 the height of the lower fall alone - he'd be less than a millimeter tall on your computer screen, a tiny black dot with no distinguishable features. Bigfoot and Yeti, at only seven or eight feet tall apiece, would be completely invisible. Hey, maybe - on second thought, never mind.