Niagara Falls

Can you hear me? I make a sound like a million drums beating all at once. ROAR. RUMBLE. CRASH. If you stand close, I will spray you with a cool, tickly mist that makes your hair damp and your cheeks giggle. On sunny days, the light shines through my mist and paints beautiful rainbows in the air, connecting one side of my riverbank to the other. I am a giant river taking a huge, exciting leap over a giant cliff. I am so big that I stand in two countries at the same time. People travel from all over the world just to hear my powerful song and feel my misty spray. I am Niagara Falls.

My story is very, very old. It started about 12,000 years ago, when the world was covered in giant blankets of ice called glaciers. These glaciers were so heavy that as they slowly slid across the land, they scraped and carved the ground beneath them. When the weather warmed up and the ice blankets finally melted, the water filled up huge holes to become the Great Lakes. The melting ice also carved the tall cliff that I now leap from every single day. The first people to live here, the Indigenous peoples, saw my power and heard my loud voice. They called me 'Thundering Waters,' and I think that’s a perfect name. Much later, in 1678, a visitor named Father Louis Hennepin came in a canoe. He couldn’t believe his eyes or his ears. He wrote in his journal about my incredible size and sound so that people far away could learn about me.

My rushing water is more than just loud and splashy, it has a superpower. I am so strong. For a long time, people just watched me, but then a very clever inventor named Nikola Tesla had a brilliant idea. In 1895, he and other smart people figured out how to use my strength to make electricity. My powerful water could turn special machines that light up homes and power whole cities. I love helping people. I also inspire them to be brave and creative. In 1901, a woman named Annie Edson Taylor bravely went over my falls in a special barrel. And for hundreds of years, artists have come with their paintbrushes to capture my rainbows and my wild, tumbling water on their canvases.

Today, I am a special place that connects two wonderful countries, the United States of America and Canada. I share my beauty with both of them. I am a happy reminder of how strong and wonderful nature can be. I hope that someday you will come to visit me. You can stand on the edge and listen to my thundering song, feel my cool mist on your face, and maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll see one of my giant rainbows stretching across the sky just for you.