Utah's 'Staircase' hike enters secret canyons
By Bob Downing
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
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ESCALANTE, Utah — There are lots of secret places hidden away in the Escalante Canyons in southern Utah — numerous slot canyons, arches, Indian paintings and carvings, outlaw hideouts and waterfalls.
Daughter Katie and I delighted in an 88-foot waterfall, Upper Calf Creek Falls, on a four-mile slickrock hike at the northern edge of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
The Escalante River and its tributaries have carved out 1,000 miles of canyons and created some of the best back country in the West. It was the last river in the continental United States to be discovered, named and mapped. It flows from 10,000-foot Boulder Mountain and the Aquarius Plateau southward for 90 miles to the Colorado River.
The Escalante Canyons are a vast country, wild and rugged and remote. It lies in the national monument and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. The lower 15 miles of the Escalante River are now part of Lake Powell, where the Colorado River has been dammed and backed up in Glen Canyon.
Recent droughts have lowered the lake level and again exposed some long-flooded canyons in Glen Canyon.
Most trails in the Escalante Canyons follow streams or washes or cut across open slickrock. There are few easy trails and almost no maintained trails.
Adventurer-artist Everett Ruess disappeared in 1934 in the Escalante Canyons and was never found or heard from again. His legend lives on in southern Utah.
Our hike to Upper Calf Falls began off state Route 12, where hikers drop off the rim of Calf Creek Canyon at an elevation of 6,530 feet en route to the falls.
It is initially a very steep drop of perhaps 300 feet over light-colored slickrock or bare Navajo sandstone. The descent is easier than it appears at first on the dry rock, but it is slow work later on the way back up to the rim.
The trail is marked by stone cairns or piles or rocks. The route continues to drop in switchbacks and steeper bands of slickrock. Then the descent slows over a gently sloping sand-and-rock bench that drops perhaps another 300 feet. The views are impressive.
