Hidden Haven Falls: a creek walk to a waterfall

Welcome to Hidden Haven Falls, up Parowan Canyon on the western edge of the Markagunt Plateau. It's a short walk, under a mile each way, following the creek to a waterfall that pours out of a narrow slot into a shady cove.

The last stretch has no single path. You'll drop into the creek bed and pick your way over boulders and stepping stones, so give small hands a hand. I'll tell you a story at each spot and stay quiet in between.

This land is the Parowan Canyon Wildlife Management Area, run by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. It's set aside mainly for animals, not people. In winter, when snow buries Brian Head above you, mule deer and elk move down into canyons like this one to find food and shelter.

Look at the plants around the trailhead: sagebrush, rabbitbrush and Gambel oak, a scrubby oak that turns gold and rust in the fall. Down by the creek you'll find a greener world of willows and streamside trees.

The road you came in on climbs more than three thousand feet from Parowan to Brian Head, from desert valley to spruce and fir. You're about halfway up.

Here's the first bridge, and a story about fire and water.

In June 2017, a fire started near Brian Head and grew into one of the largest in Utah that year, burning more than a hundred square miles of these mountains. That August, summer storms dropped heavy rain on the bare, burned slopes. With nothing left to hold the soil, ash and mud poured down Parowan Creek. The flood tore out a lane of the highway and flooded homes in town.

Those flows rearranged this canyon. Creeks moved, banks collapsed, and the path to the falls had to change with them. Notice the warning signs. A storm on the plateau can still send water down here fast.

This open flat is a nice place to stop. A little further on, look for a second bridge. It crosses a dry channel, an old bed of Benson Creek that the water abandoned after the floods.

The town at the bottom of the canyon has a long story. In January 1851, a company of about a hundred and sixty-eight settlers arrived from Salt Lake City on what was called the Iron Mission. Their job was to mine the iron ore found nearby. They chose Parowan for its water, its timber and its iron. It became known as the Mother Town of southern Utah, because so many later towns were settled from here.

The water you're walking beside still matters. Downstream, this creek feeds the town's fields.

Now the walking gets interesting. You're in the creek bed between low cliffs, hopping across stepping stones and over fallen logs.

Long before the settlers came, this was Southern Paiute country. Paiute families lived in these valleys for centuries, moving with the seasons between the low desert and the cool mountains above, gathering pine nuts, seeds and plants and hunting deer. Their descendants are part of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, based in nearby Cedar City.

The name Parowan is often said to come from a Native word meaning evil water, possibly for the salty lake in the valley below. Whatever its exact origin, the name is older than the town. Listen ahead. You may hear the falls before you see them.

Welcome to Hidden Haven. Here Benson Creek spills out of the mouth of a narrow slot and falls freely into this shady, tucked-away cove. In autumn it may be just a trickle, but after spring snowmelt or a summer storm it really runs. Some visitors in late fall find it hung with ice.

The mountains above you are built from layers you saw at Bryce. The same pink and white Claron rock that forms Bryce's hoodoos and the Cedar Breaks amphitheater caps this plateau. Above and among those layers lie volcanic rocks, from enormous eruptions about twenty-seven million years ago.

Take your time here. On the walk back, watch for deer tracks in the soft ground by the creek. In a few weeks, as the snow arrives above, this canyon becomes their winter home. Thanks for walking to Hidden Haven with me.