The landscape around Hukou Falls is as interesting as the falls themselves. The loess plateau here is an ancient, heavily eroded surface: the Yellow River has cut down through hundreds of metres of compacted wind-blown dust, creating deep gorges and exposing the layered geology in the cliff faces on both banks. The terracotta colour of the cliffs, the yellow-brown river, the grey-green poplars on the floodplain, and the ochre-tiled farmhouses on the terraced slopes above combine into a specifically Chinese landscape with no analogue elsewhere.
Walking the riverside path on the Shaanxi bank gives you close contact with this geology: you can touch the loess cliff faces, which are soft enough to scratch with a fingernail, and see how the water has carved the basalt of the falls gorge into smooth curved forms beneath the rough layered loess above. The contrast between the two rock types — one ancient and hard, one recent and friable — explains the falls' existence: the basalt created the obstruction, the loess shaped the wider valley.