Landslides from nearby earthquakes

"Then, suddenly, out of the strange silence and strange motion there came a tremendous roar. The Eagle Rock on the south wall, about a half a mile up the Valley, gave way and I saw it falling in thousands of the great boulders I had so long been studying, pouring to the Valley floor in a free curve luminous from friction, making a terribly sublime spectacle--an arc of glowing, passionate fire, fifteen hundred feet span, as true in form and as serene in beauty as a rainbow in the midst of the stupendous, roaring rockstorm."

--John Muir, The Yosemite, describing the effect of the 1872 Owens Valley earthquake in Yosemite Valley

Another rockfall occurred behind Snow's Hotel on that evening in 1872, near the base of Nevada Falls and towards the bottom of the photo at left. Rubble seen within the dotted line at left came from within the dashed line on the cliff above. The windburst from the rockfall knocked hotel owner Mr. Snow down. Photo by Carleton Watkins, 1878, Yosemite Museum Catalog 571. This version from Wieczorek, Catastropic rockfalls and rockslides in the Sierra Nevada, USA, Reviews in Engineering Geology, 2002

Although the earthquakes outside Yosemite break rocks far from the park and valley, the shaking can make rocks fall from their perches high up on the sheer cliffs of the valley wall. The rockfall that John Muir described in 1872 is found just to the east of the chapel near the Sentinel Bridge. That rockfall, though spectacular, didn't kill any park visitors. In May of 1980, smaller earthquakes near Mammoth Lakes, just to the southeast of the Park, triggered several rockfalls, including one that injured two hikers.

Learn about another rockfall not caused by earthquakes that generated their own earthquake waves