We are really having a gorgeous autumn with the leaf colours. I think the fine weather in the earlier part of this month really enabled the trees to show their best hues. It also helped that the rain started later in the month so as not to knock everything off into the gutters below in a mucky brown mess. I shall get about doing some autumn paintings very soon.

This painting has nothing to do with leaves but I thought I would post it since it is what I have been working on lately. It is "Lower Calf Creek Falls" in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. A spring somewhere seven miles distant, provides this flow of water that makes it way down through the desert, eventually dropping 126 feet over the sandstone cliff edge. You can't see the falls until the very last step of your hike. You turn the bend and there it is, in all its cool emerald and honey-toned glory. The heat from the canyon does not enter here as the finest mist, more felt than seen, blows through the shady cottonwoods that surround the falls.

The pool of water is fuh-reezing in a scream-in-your-head kind of way, but still a delicious swim after a hot 5.5 mile hot hike through hot sand and hot rock in hot air.