Bird Woman Falls

Bird Woman Falls Overlook, coming up on your right, out on the drop side, and almost everyone who stops there looks at the wrong waterfall. If you pulled in, turn right to carry on. The cascades right in front of you are Haystack Creek, and that's not Bird Woman Falls. The real one is across the valley, four hundred ninety-two feet of it. Facing across, it starts between Mount Oberlin on the left and Mount Cannon on the right. A side glacier couldn't cut as deep as the main one, so its valley ends in mid-air, and the water has nowhere to go but over. An active glacier once fed these falls. Only a snowfield does now, and in especially dry years they dry up by fall. This pull-off was a quarry. In the nineteen thirties, much of the west-side stonework came from right here, in rock that often split under the mason's hands. Look at the walls with that in mind, because they were policed. In nineteen twenty-seven a landscape architect named Ernest Davidson made crews tear out high square parapets for low broad ones, then condemned wall after wall for looks. He complained that masons were after bizarre effects, like a red arch ring set in green stone. Those low walls that look so natural had a critic standing over them. Now watch the layers in the rock as you climb. The road rises at an almost constant six percent, but those layers tilt up to the east at a sharper angle, ten degrees, shoved up by the Lewis Overthrust. You're climbing a mountain and sinking through its pages. The park keeps a memory aid for all of this rock, four words long. Silt, tilt, slide and glide. Silt is the sediment of an ancient sea. Tilt is the first collision that raised it. Slide is the Lewis Overthrust. Glide is the glaciers that carved the peaks. Look above the road cuts to the loose rock slopes. Late each summer, millions of army cutworm moths leave the hot prairies east of the park to roost under the rocks of high slopes like these, and grizzlies flip the stones and feast on them for a few weeks. The road cuts themselves hold something older than all of it. Along this grade, nearly every bed of Siyeh limestone is full of fossil algae, reefs built up layer by layer in the shallow Belt Sea, more than a billion years ago. Sliced through, they look like cabbage heads with concentric rings, and the rounded masses run up to several feet across, so smooth that climbers find the reef hard to cross. Back then this country looked more like the Bahamas. So from the next pull-off, look for a cabbage in the rock.