Eternal Flame Falls: The Fire That Should Not Burn
The trail begins in unremarkable woods. A little south of Buffalo, New York, a footpath drops through the hemlocks of Chestnut Ridge Park, past the ferns and the wet black rock, and follows Shale Creek down toward a low cascade in a preserve that borrows the creek's name. It is not a grand waterfall. Barely thirty feet high, a modest sheet of water folding over a ledge of dark shale, it is the kind of place a hiker might pass without a second glance. Except for one thing. Push in close, crouch at the base, and peer into the shallow grotto that the water has scooped out of the rock behind the falling curtain, and you find something that has no business being there: a small golden flame, roughly the height of a hand, burning steadily inside the waterfall.
Mist beads on the stone around it. Spray runs down the rock and drips from the ledge overhead. The flame leans in the draught, recovers, and goes on burning in what may be the least hospitable spot on earth for a fire to keep going: wet, cold, drenched, walled in on every side by falling water. People have come to look at it for generations. They call it the Eternal Flame, and the postcards call it one of the most beautiful of all the world's burning springs.
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