Cascade Springs is an oasis of lush vegetation, inviting pools, and cascading waterfalls located within the Uinta National Forest in the Wasatch Range, east of American Fork Canyon and west of Wasatch Mountain State Park. Water from the springs flows over a series of travertine terraces and pools and eventually continues on its way to nearby Provo Deer Creek. We saw a ton of wildlife, including beavers, deer, wild turkeys, hawks, hummingbirds, and numerous songbirds. The park has a trail system of paved paths, raised boardwalks, and wooden bridges with three interconnecting loops, so you can either take a short stroll or a long hike (2 miles). It was a really pretty place, and the Pugs loved it.
Educational Moment: The area around Cascade Springs is underlain by coarse-grained glacial sediment deposited when glaciers covered high elevations of the Wasatch Range approximately 30,000 to 10,000 years ago. Beneath the glacial deposits, bedrock consists of Cambrian-age (about 500 million years old) quartzite, shale, sandstone, and limestone. More than 7 million gallons of water flows through Cascade Springs each day. The original source of this water is rain and snow falling on the Wasatch Range. Precipitation that does not end up in streams, evaporate, or get used by plants infiltrates slowly downward along bedrock fractures to become ground water. Ground water passes through the tilted rock layers until it encounters an impermeable layer, which redirects the water upward toward the surface where it seeps through the thin layer of glacial deposits. As the water moves underground, it dissolves calcium carbonate from rocks such as limestone and dolomite. After reaching the surface, the water cascades over the terraces and releases carbon dioxide gas, which changes the water chemistry and allows calcium carbonate to be precipitated forming travertine, a finely crystalline limestone. The terraces around the pools are slowly but continually changing shape as new travertine is formed.
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