Utah’s Yosemite-like Little Cottonwood Canyon

Photographer: Ray BorenSummary Author: Ray Boren

In erosional processes similar to those that shaped California’s beautiful Yosemite Valley, Ice Age glaciers played a major role in carving parts of Utah’s Wasatch Range some 10,000 to 30,000 years ago, and their work is particularly evident at the classic U-shaped mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon, which opens into southeastern Salt Lake Valley. 

As in far-away Yosemite, several waterfalls cascade down Little Cottonwood’s granitic cliffs, especially in spring and early summer, as illustrated in the first photograph, taken June 11, 2024. The image captures tresses of a steep waterfall popularly dubbed “the Great White Icicle” by rock and ice climbers who dare to scale it in frigid winter, as my friend Holly Mullen informed me. The rock-climbing routes in the cliffs above the canyon's mouth were recently added to the National Register of Historic Places, as the Little Cottonwood Canyon Climbing Area — apparently the first such designation of that kind.

A second autumnal image, taken on October 9, 2019, offers a panoramic perspective at the canyon’s mouth, as seen from the G.K. Gilbert Geologic View Park. The little park is named for Grove Karl Gilbert (1843-1918), a pioneering geologist and theorist, who was the first to postulate that the Little Cottonwood Canyon and adjacent Bells Canyon glaciers extended all the way down to the shoreline of ancient Lake Bonneville, Great Salt Lake’s much larger late-Pleistocene predecessor.

The Utah Geological Survey says that the Wasatch slopes at the canyon’s mouth include the 1.7-billion-year-old metamorphic Little Willow Formation, consisting of quartz schist and gneiss; shale/slate and quartzite layers of the Big Cottonwood Formation, deposited in a tidal and shoreline setting just under a billion years ago; and the younger 31-million-year-old Little Cottonwood Stock, an intrusive, igneous quartz monzonite. All of these ancient rocks were uplifted by the Wasatch Fault, as it built the Wasatch Range. The latter, granitic monzonite was quarried more than a century ago for blocks used in the construction of such local landmarks as the Utah State Capitol and the Salt Lake Temple, of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

 

Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah Coordinates: 40.5725, -111.7732

Related Links:Yosemite Valley from Tunnel ViewThe White Cliff of Alta with Autumn GoldUtah’s Geologic History