Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument
Wednesday 15 September-Friday 17 September, 2021
Calf Creek Falls.
Ruggedly beautiful Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument straddles the edge of the Colorado Plateau and the Utah high country, between two of Utah's "Big Five" national parks, Bryce Canyon (visited on previous trip) and Capitol Reef (visited later on this trip). Less colorful (and also less visited and less developed) than the nearby national parks, the monument still contains great wonders of water and wind erosion, and many dramatically exposed layers of rock. While paved UT 12 crosses the northern part of the park, and paved US 89 crosses the southern part, most of the park's roads are unpaved, and the optimal vehicle for touring here is not so much a Subaru as a Jeep. Many locations, however, can be reached with a Subaru or even a Civic. We had been excited by the arches and other formations along the Cottonwood Canyon Road on the west side of the park on our past visit, and we were eager to see the geologic wonder of the east side.
View from UT 12 overlook.
Eric's photo of me, hiking through the Escalante. Note the different colors in the rock.
Eric drove Mather many miles on dirt, and we hiked the park's incredible canyons, having amazing adventures but also enduring some mishaps along the way.
- Devil's Garden, with fine examples of hoodoos
- Incredible Calf Creek Falls, the most enjoyable hike of the trip
- Burr Trail Road, including Singing Canyon, a relatively easy and accessible slot canyon
I think the colorful formations near the bottom are the Triassic Chinle Formation, about 225 million years old, with Wingate Sandstone (about 200 million years old, straddling the Triassic and Jurassic periods) above. Note that the beautiful rock layers exposed in the high country at Bryce and Zion have been eroded away here, and that we are looking at older, deeper layers of the Escalante (Based on Geology Unfolded by Morris, Ritter, & Laycock)
Geocaching in this area provided Eric with opportunities for his "Subaru commercial" photos.
One evening, when we returned to the Circle Cliffs Motel in Boulder, we found Mather's twin in front of the next-door room.
We cannot talk about a visit to wonderful Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument without mentioning that the park was brutally attacked by the last US administration, reducing the size of the monument by half, and opening protected places to mining interests. The monument has, after a significant delay, now been restored to its former size. As a national monument rather than a national park, Grand Staircase Escalante is vulnerable to the sort of abuse it suffered. Were Grand Staircase Escalante to be elevated to national park status, increased development and visitation would also irrevocably change the character of the area. It is unfortunate that some people look at a beautiful area like this and think only of extracting its minerals, using it up in one generation and leaving nothing for the future.
We couldn't visit Boulder without having dinner from Hell's Backbone Grill. When the last administration attacked the monument, the owners of this wonderful restaurant sued, claiming that protecting the monument was beneficial to their business interests. The whole story was elaborately written up in the New Yorker. We wanted to support their efforts, and also to eat something other than backpacker meals, and we were delighted to find we could order and pick up takeout without entering any buildings, and that masks were required even to approach the takeout stand. We enjoyed the meal, and the biscuits, so much that we went back for a second dinner a couple of days later.
Candles novena on the take-out counter at Hell's Backbone Grill, Anthony Fauci, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Carl Sagan.
They also had cats, but of course I couldn't get a cat to look at the camera.
If it is impractical for you to buy a delicious meal from Hell's Backbone Grill yourself, you can still make a contribution to the National Resources Defense Council or the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which also sued the former administration to stop mining of these precious areas.
Touring a remote and relatively undeveloped area such as Grand Staircase Escalante is a challenging adventure. We celebrate the wonderful parts and learn from our mistakes so that our next visit will be more successful.
Photo of a cyclist on incredible UT 12 by Eric.
Distance hiked: 22 km/14 mi
Distance driven: 332 km/206 mi, cumulatively 1,852 km/1,151 mi
Caches found: 6, cumulatively 9
On to Capitol Reef National Park.