In Utah, we visited Grand Staircase-Escalante, Zion National Park, and Monument Valley. Our first location in Utah was the southern end of Grand Staircase-Escalante.
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
The national monument was established in 1996. Its size was cut in half in 2017 and restored in 2021. Unlike many of the other national monuments I’ve visited, Grand Staircase-Escalante is managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rather than the National Park Service.
Grand Staircase-Escalante has many landscapes and features within its bounds – slot canyons, mountains, plateaus, and rivers.
The monument’s name comes from the Grand Staircase, a monumental sequence of rock layers stretching from Bryce Canyon National Park into Grand Canyon National Park. Geologist Clarence Dutton first described this region as a large stairway ascending from the bottom of the Grand Canyon in the 1870s.
Our Visit
We parked at an out-of-the-way trailhead parking lot with no one else around. The area was beautiful and empty except us.
At one point we just stood in the middle of the trail and listened to the silence. The landscape was different as it was more yellows and tans than the reds we’d been seeing.
We could have spent the afternoon there; however, we left after about an hour. Due to the unexpected downpour the night before, a creek flowed over the road to the parking lot. Though we took the chance to enjoy the landscape, it started to rain again. I didn’t want to stay too long, worried about rain making the lane impassable on our way back.