Sunrift Gorge

You park for Sunrift Gorge on your right, a few hundred yards on. It's one of the shortest walks on this road, two hundred feet of trail. If you pulled in, turn right and follow the lake. Just east of here, Sun Point held the largest and most popular chalet group in the park, with a formal dining room, a lobby full of art and staff in Swiss-style uniforms. A Great Northern brochure sold it as artistic crudeness with comfort. It closed after nineteen forty-one and never reopened. The gorge is across the road from the pull-off, so cross on foot with care, and before you do, put a hand on the stone guard wall. It's a free rock collection, with nearly every important kind of rock in the park within arm's reach. Then it's two hundred feet up a few stairs to where Baring Creek has cut a gorge eight hundred feet long and eighty feet deep. Look upstream and notice how straight it runs. Water doesn't do that on its own. The creek found a fracture already in the rock and followed it, and the same kind of joint explains the smooth faces on some of the park's highest cliffs. Baring Falls is three tenths of a mile from the same trailhead, fifty feet up and a hundred fifteen down. The Reynolds Creek Fire burned about five thousand acres on the north shore of this lake in two thousand fifteen and took the historic Baring Creek cabin. Some flowers wait for exactly that. Bicknell's geranium and rock harlequin stay as seeds for decades, flower profusely for a season or two after a burn, then vanish until the next fire. The red rock you drove along between Siyeh Creek and here holds mud cracks, ripple marks and raindrop impressions. That's a mud flat drying in the sun and a shower of rain from about a billion and a half years ago, still printed in the stone.