There is a waterfall in the southwest corner of Chestnut Ridge Park with a fire burning behind it. Not a story about a fire, but an actual flame, a few inches tall, sitting in a small grotto at the base of the falls, burning inside a curtain of falling water. It goes out often enough that hikers carry lighters up the creek to restart it.
The name is Eternal Flame Falls. The "eternal" part is aspirational.
Gas coming straight out of the rock
The grotto vents natural gas. It seeps out steadily enough that a lit flame will hold for long stretches, through rain and through snow. Wind takes it out. High water takes it out: when the creek is running hard, the falls pour directly over the mouth of the grotto and drown the thing entirely. Then somebody hikes in, holds a lighter to the seep, and it comes back with a pop.
The drop itself is modest, roughly thirty feet, falling in two segments over layered rock in the old Shale Creek Preserve section of the park. Without the flame it would be one more pleasant Southtowns waterfall in a county that has dozens. The flame is the entire reason anyone makes the walk.
A 2013 study that raised more questions than it settled
In 2013 a research team published the first serious geochemical look at the seep, in the journal Marine and Petroleum Geology. Giuseppe Etiope of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology led it, working with Arndt Schimmelmann of Indiana University Bloomington and Agnieszka Drobniak and Maria Mastalerz of the Indiana Geological Survey. They traced the gas to the Rhinestreet Shale, an Upper Devonian formation roughly 400 metres (about 1,300 feet) beneath the park, reaching the surface through faults opened by tectonic activity.
That part was tidy. The rest was not. Thermogenic gas of this composition is generally understood to require temperatures somewhere around 100°C to form. The Rhinestreet Shale under Chestnut Ridge is nowhere near that hot, and the team measured its thermal maturity as low, near the beginning of the conventional oil-generating range. The gas looks cooked. The rock it came out of does not.
The mixture is unusual on its own terms. Ethane and propane together account for about 35 percent of what comes out of the grotto, which the researchers described as possibly the highest concentration of those two gases ever measured at a natural seep at the Earth's surface. The main vent gives off roughly a kilogram of methane a day, and the team logged a scatter of smaller micro-seeps nearby.
The uncomfortable implication is that cooler, shallower shale may produce or hold gas through some process not yet accounted for. A hole in the textbook, lit on fire, at the bottom of a ravine in Orchard Park.
The walk in
Erie County puts the hike at 1.12 miles with about 200 feet of elevation change, and lists the footing as mud, dirt, roots and water. That last one is not a figure of speech: part of the route runs in the creek itself. It is steep in places and slick in most of them.
The Erie County Sheriff's Office pulls injured hikers off this trail with depressing regularity, ankles mostly, occasionally with deputies rappelling into the ravine to reach them. In July 2026, after two separate rescues in a single afternoon, the sheriff went public asking people to wear real footwear and know their limits. Boots, not sandals. The trail also closes outright when ice makes it untenable, so check before you drive out.
Why it stays interesting
Most natural wonders are protected from you. This one is not. There is no railing at the grotto, no plaque, no attendant. The flame exists because gas comes out of a hole in the rock and because a stranger you will never meet stopped on the way past and lit it. It has been maintained informally, by whoever showed up, for generations. That is a very Western New York arrangement.
It is also worth saying plainly: this is a live methane seep in a wet ravine. Relight it if it is out, keep out of the water above the grotto, and do not treat a natural gas vent as a photo prop.
Wear it
The Eternal Flame Falls tee is for people who have actually done the creek walk and come out with wet socks. It shares a town with our Chestnut Ridge Park and Friends Meeting House designs, which is fitting: the falls sit inside the park, and the Quakers got to Orchard Park before either. All three are part of the ALL America City collection, one real Western New York landmark per shirt. To see what else made the list, here is the full town-by-town guide.