Many, many years ago, I hiked the Lower Calf Creek Falls trail in southern Utah for the first time. I had no intention whatsoever of hiking all the way to the falls, but I ran into someone on his way back who said, “Oh, you must go all the way. The falls are so great.” I was peering across the canyon at the pictographs below and thought the hike had already been incredibly spectacular, but he was quite persuasive, so I continued on my way.
I was so happy I’d listened to my chance acquaintance — one of only a handful of folks I encountered on that first hike. The scenery was drop-dead gorgeous every step of the way.
Since then, I’ve hiked to Lower Calf Creek Falls twice more, always in mid-October. It’s still quite warm at that time of the year, and the temperature is honestly part of what makes it such an incredible hike.
The reason is that, after three-plus miles of hiking through a slickrock, desert-y landscape, hot, sweating, and partially dehydrated (no matter how much water you’ve carried), you all of a sudden end up in a shaded clearing right in front of the falls. Between the water spray and the shade, it’s a matter of just a few moments before you’re actively cold. It’s an amazing and wonderful contrast.
Here’s a closeup of the pictographs, by the way. There’s a much fainter pictograph in the lower right corner which looks to me like a bird standing on top of a cage. If it looks like something else to you, please feel free to share your thoughts with the rest of us.
In any case, I got exceptionally lucky when I visited this past October. I’d planned to hike in the afternoon but had a bit of a stomach bug. I put the hike off until the following morning and did some easier sightseeing instead.
I couldn’t have asked for better light the next day. If I’d gone the previous afternoon, the striped canyon walls would no longer have been in shadow which, paradoxically, would have made all those beautiful lines much harder to see. Plus, all the places where the light hadn’t been quite right on the way out looked perfect on the way back.
This was my first glimpse of the falls, the first moment I thought, “I’m almost there!” The moment I knew cool relief was at hand.
My plan had been to sit on a rock in front of the falls and eat my lunch in the shade. There were so many other people, though, that there was nowhere to sit (despite the fact that it was a weekday). So I stood and ate a bit of my lunch and, once I started shivering, started back to the trailhead.
My opinion: The hike to Lower Calf Creek Falls is one of the best ever, anywhere. Yes, it’s about seven miles round-trip, but just as the guy I ran into all those years ago told me, it’s so worth it.
Beautiful, stunning photos!
I've seen photos of pictographs just like the faint one in the lower right corner, in many different sizes. Many theories have been used describing these particular images, and the most prevalent ones are that they represent either a chief of some kind, a healer, or a deity of some kind. Since the indigenous people who made these pictographs left no real record of their meaning, these are just the best "guesses" based on pictograph usage on pottery and stone in many other areas of the southwest. I'm going with a tribal chief or a tribal healer. But that's just me.