The Harriman Expedition had visited Shoshone Falls during their trip to Alaska in 1899. Their photos of the falls were widely published and it seems reasonable to assume Ridgway saw them and decided to go see for himself. As he wrote in the first sentence of his article on Lake Crescent, “A philosopher once remarked, he would take no man's word for the taste of a dish or the attractiveness of a woman.”

The falls are part of the Snake River Gorge and it was not far downstream of the falls in 1974 that Evil Knievel attempted, unsuccessfully, to jump the 1,600 foot wide gorge riding a steam powered rocket.