I had an itch this week to visit a waterfall. I also had an itch to get out and hike. Lately, most of my photography seems to result from roadside pullouts, drive by shootings. This weekend I longed to hit the trail with a fully loaded backpack of camera gear and visit some nearby waterfalls. Neither of the falls I hiked to were long distances from the car, only a few miles. But simply wandering through the woods again was deeply refreshing to my soul. We’ve had a lot of rain the last several weeks so the ground was well soaked. In places I walked through boggy patches of slippery mud. The air was thick with a rich earthy smell and the trees still dripped occasionally from the high levels of humidity. I don’t think there is a more pleasant smell than that of a well-soaked forest.

Mount Timpanogos is my backyard, well actually it is my front yard since I can look out the front window of my home and watch it daily. Around its perimeter are waterfalls that drain the upper snowy slopes or runoff from numerous springs. These waterfalls run year-round but are not always easily accessible. In another few weeks the backroads will close and one can only reach the trailheads by snowshoe or snowmobile. So, knowing my time was growing short, I drove to Aspen Groves to hike to Stewart Falls.

In the 1970’s, when I first moved to Utah, Stewart Falls was one of the first treasures I found. It wasn’t nearly as popular as it is now. The population in the valley has grown tremendously since those days. It seems I never visit this falls in the summer because of the crowds that gather. It’s the end of the season now and I only crossed paths with a half dozen other hikers.

The other waterfall I hiked to was Battle Creek Falls, on the front, or valley side of the Mountain. I arrived an hour before sunset, but because the falls faced directly into the setting sun, I waited for the sun to slip below the rim of the canyon so I could shoot in even light. I shot well past sunset and enjoyed this waterfall all to myself.

These are simple images. It was fun playing with my 3-stop neutral density filter, allowing me to slow my exposure enough to smooth out the cascading water. I shot some reference shots without the ND filter in which I froze the motion of the falls, but the images lack the dreaminess and ethereal beauty of implied motion. Stewart Falls was shot with 1 second exposures. For Battle Creek Falls I used a 4 second exposure.