Cascade Falls & The Ice Cave, Dixie National Forest

It was absolutely necessary that we spent our final days before school starts down in Southern Utah somewhere. So we camped down at Duck Creek with the Grossarths in the Dixie National Forest. It was a great campground just a few miles away from Brianhead Ski Resort and Cedar Breaks. Being high in elevation, it was close to the great recreation of Southern Utah without the blistering heat in camp. Erik's nephew, Stephen, had just moved to Provo for his freshman year at the Y so he ditched freshman orientation and joined us for the fun. On Friday we had a pretty chill day relaxing in camp most of the day. In the afternoon though we did venture out to do a short hike and explore a cave.

We hiked to Cascade Falls, where an underground river spits out of the pink cliffs, cascades down hundreds of feet from the rim, and eventually meets up with the Virgin River and flows into the Narrows. It was a gorgeous hike with a lot or reward for only being 1 mile long. Off of the rim we could see all the way into Zion Nat'l Park on the horizon.

After the falls, we went to the Ice Cave. This was a childhood favorites of Kyle's that was apparently a little bit of a disappointment to him when he returned as an adult. But because he talked it down so much before we got there it turned out to be a lot cooler that we had expected. We took the opportunity to teach the group how to rappel and how to use their climbing gear we were going to be using the next day canyoneering in Zion.