Calf Creek Falls

4/13/09
Easter morning was clear with a warm sun and a cold erratic wind hard to find shelter from. The drive over Scenic Highway 12 became very scenic after Escalante. I stopped at Petrified Forest State Park but the wind there was unbearable, so I moved along and found a very pleasant site at Calf Creek Campground, right on the creek, decent privacy, $7, no water, no garbage disposal. The wind had either died down or was deflected by the canyon walls. Best of all, the trailhead for Calf Creek Falls was right in the campground. I could eat, relax, and then hike at my leisure. I was set for the day.

The Calf Creek Recreational Area is a tiny part of the enormous Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, its 1,900,000 acres more than twice the size of Utah’s five national parks put together. It is very rugged, very undeveloped country, difficult-to-impossible to access with a subcompact such as my Yaris. So Calf Creek, right off the highway, would have to serve as my contact with this amazing canyon wilderness.

I set out on my hike in mid-afternoon. The nearly flat trail paralleled Calf Creek, suspiciously straight for such a low gradient along a soft sediment; a meander would be more expected. I presume the creek had been ditched back when this area was agriculture and has subsequently deepened its small trench. The wide canyon floor was covered in thick brush mostly still dormant in spare winter color.

The walls of Calf Creek Canyon are Navajo Sandstone and the Kayenta Formation, the stars of Zion National Park. I was hiking on the red sand of pulverized Kayenta Formation. According to my guide book the trail crossed the contact point between Kayenta and Navajo Sandstone, but I think I must have missed that. I was busy gaping across the canyon at a spectacular wall of Navajo Sandstone. The cliffs were more modest than at Zion, hundreds of feet high instead of thousands, but at a more easily encompassed distance. The sky was clear blue and the creamy beige walls were wonderfully lit in low late afternoon sun. It was a perfect time to hike.

A tremendous alcove had been cut into the cliffs, a common phenomenon for Navajo Sandstone. The rock is very porous, absorbing rainwater and snowmelt like an aquifer. At some point this dripping water hit’s an impermeable layer within the sandstone and seeps laterally until it reaches an opening and begins dripping out. These drippings gradually create the alcove, and decorate it with streaks of minerals. Plant life springs up in the moisture adding further color. Navajo talus littered the Kayenta slopes, Calf Creek floods apparently less able to flush out the canyon debris than the Virgin River can in Zion Canyon.

Further up creek the canyon narrowed and I was a lot closer to the walls. Here they retained much more iron oxide than downstream, and in the low sun glowed a bright orange. Swaths of gray challenged the orange as if they’d been laid down by a painter testing colors. Desert varnish added darker strips making for one painterly wall. A hawk flew overhead.

Calf Creek Canyon

Lower Calf Creek Falls is gorgeous, 125 feet of picturesque swirl down the face of Navajo Sandstone into a gleaming circular plunge pool. A combination of free falls, ledges, slides, and braided ribbons make an elegant, dancing figure. The saturated wall gleams golden, with mosses and minerals providing rich coloring. The wall markings suggest the falls is sometimes wider but all the pictures I’ve seen look quite similar. A sandy beach surrounded the plunge pool.

Happily, I had the falls to myself. I had passed a crowd on my way in and on my way out I would pass a half dozen people coming in for the evening shift, but I was free to hop about without self-consciousness or impediments. I wanted to take a million pictures, though there were only so many pictures to be taken. I have that problem. I wanted to become one with the waterfalls. In the heat of summer many undoubtedly do, but this had less appeal in the cool April shade. So I tried to cultivate some analytic distance. Why was there a falls here? Is it a hanging valley? Did the creek erode an exposure of softer Kayenta Formation? Where does the water come from? Why is there a perennial creek here at all? All my hiking and guide books mentioned this trail but none of them offered anything on these questions. I think basic geology and hydrology should be mandatory for all descriptions of waterfalls. I was on my own.

Lower Calf Creek Falls is said to be the most photographed falls on the Colorado Plateau and who could doubt it. How many 100-foot high perennial waterfalls are there in the high desert of the Colorado Plateau, much less along flat trails three miles from a paved highway? The more interesting question is what might be the second most photographed waterfall in canyon country, outside of Grand Canyon at any rate. Calf Creek Falls is a glorious anomaly and needs a better explanation than that it is pretty and cooling.

 For my walk back the light was even better and I was confirmed in my belief that the canyon walls are as good a reason to hike the trail as the penultimate falls. I was back to my campsite in time for the last light. While some objective standards might rate my campsite at Kodachrome Basin more beautiful, to my tastes my site at Calf Creek was far better, one of the best on my whole trip.