Glens Falls is a cataract on the Hudson River where a rocky island and two caves briefly shelter the pursued travelers. Its shifting channels govern their escape: the same broken waters that threaten to sweep away their canoe also conceal their refuge, making the place both a natural stronghold and a demanding passage through the wilderness.

Setting and Formation

The falls are portrayed as an irregular, changing landscape rather than a single, orderly drop. Water leaps, tumbles, shoots, and gathers in hollows, wearing deep cavities into the rock; the cataract has retreated from its former position, leaving the river's center bare and dry. Hawkeye explains the two caves as products of this erosion: softer limestone on either side gave way as the water worked backward, while the central rock remained exposed.

The narrative's note identifies Glens Falls as lying on the Hudson, some forty or fifty miles above the head of tide. It also describes the rocky island and caves as landmarks familiar to later travelers, with the island supporting a bridge pier immediately above the fall. That later infrastructure sharply contrasts with the wilderness setting in which the fugitives encounter the place.

Refuge and River Crossing

The travelers reach the falls at night, moving a canoe upstream beneath the bank while the scout listens for pursuers. They launch into the turbulent current, and the canoe struggles against the rapids before reaching a flat rock beside the cataract. The landing is precarious: once the passengers step onto the rock, the canoe spins away, leaving them temporarily stranded among broken stones and deep, roaring cavities.

The scout soon returns with the canoe, and the group takes refuge in one of the caves. Chingachgook reveals that the shelter has a second outlet, crossing a deep, narrow chasm open to the sky into another cave much like the first. The concealed passage means that the apparent enclosure is not a trap with only one entrance, turning the eroded formation into a defensible hiding place.

Landscape, Knowledge, and Change

The falls' practical value depends on close knowledge of water and terrain. The scout pilots the canoe around submerged hazards and judges where the current can be stemmed; the caves offer concealment, while the island and surrounding cataracts complicate movement. In this setting, survival rests on reading the river's particulars rather than treating the wilderness as undifferentiated scenery.

Hawkeye's account of the cataract links its changing form to a broader reflection on nature's apparent disorder and eventual return to a course. The narrator, meanwhile, notes that civilized uses have materially injured the falls' beauty and that the later bridge has made the island a familiar point of travel. Glens Falls thus appears first as a hazardous refuge shaped by water and rock, and later as a landscape modified and incorporated into human transit.