Upper Mesa Falls

The Henrys Fork is a famous river, a wide, spring-fed trout stream that glides through the pine flats of eastern Idaho, and at Mesa Falls it briefly turns violent. The whole river gathers and drops over a rock lip in a single broad curtain, throwing up a permanent cloud of mist that catches rainbows on sunny mornings.

The Forest Service has built a boardwalk and a series of platforms that carry you from the rim down along the falls, so you experience it up close rather than from a distant pullout. A few miles downstream, a highway overlook gives a long view of Lower Mesa Falls, the river's second drop, from across the canyon.

The rock the falls pour over tells a violent story. It is the Mesa Falls Tuff, a thick sheet of welded volcanic ash laid down about 1.3 million years ago in one of the enormous caldera eruptions of the Yellowstone hotspot, the second most recent of those cataclysms, which blasted out hundreds of cubic kilometers of material.

As the Henrys Fork later cut down through that hardened tuff, it reached a resistant ledge and began to plunge, carving the falls you see today. Standing at the base, you are looking at a river working on the bones of an ancient supervolcano, the same restless system that still powers the geysers of Yellowstone just up the road.

Perched above the falls is a handsome log building, the Big Falls Inn, raised in the early twentieth century by a power company that had eyed this drop for hydroelectricity. The dam never came, but the building found other lives, serving over the years as a hotel, a cafe, and a dance hall, and a way station for ranchers, sportsmen, and tourists traveling the old road toward Yellowstone. Sources differ on the exact year it went up, generally placing it between about 1907 and the mid-1910s.

After acquiring the inn in 1986, the Forest Service partnered with nearby Harriman State Park and other supporters to restore it, and today the old log lodge serves as the visitor center at the falls, a warm, historic anchor to a wild place.

This is the homeland of the Shoshone and Bannock peoples, whose descendants are enrolled today in the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and the Henrys Fork country has drawn people to its water and fish for a very long time. The falls sit in the Caribou-Targhee National Forest amid lodgepole pine, aspen, and huckleberry, home to moose, elk, deer, and the eagles and ospreys that hunt the river. The Henrys Fork itself is a legendary trout stream, though the falls are far too wild to fish.

Timing shapes the visit. Snowmelt in late spring and early summer sends the biggest, most deafening flows over the lip. Summer and fall bring easy access and golden aspens along the byway. In deep winter the scenic byway closes to cars beyond a point, and the falls become a reward for those who ski or ride in to watch the water steam and freeze at the edges.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.