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In September of 1996,
President Clinton designated this huge national
monument, which at 1.9 million acres dominates any
map of Southern Utah. The monument is a geologic
sampler, with a huge variety of formations,
features, and world-class paleontological sites.
The Grand Staircase is a geological formation
spanning eons of time and is a territory of
multicolored cliffs, plateaus, mesas, buttes,
pinnacles, and canyons. It is divided into three
distinct sections: the Grand Staircase, the Kaiparowits
Plateau, and the Canyons of the Escalante. |
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Despite their different topographies, these three sections share certain
qualities: great distances, enormously difficult terrain, and a
remoteness rarely equaled in the lower forty-eight states. Human
endeavors have always been limited on these lands, yet their very
remoteness and isolation have attracted seekers of adventure or solitude
and those who hope to understand the natural world through the
Monument's wealth of scientific information.
The highest part of the Monument is the Kaiparowits Plateau. From the air, the Plateau appears to fan out
southward from the town of Escalante into an enormous grayish green
scalene triangle, ending far to the south at Lake
Powell and the Paria Plateau. The 800,000-plus acres of the
Kaiparowits form the wildest, most arid, and most remote part of the
Monument.
The fossil-rich rocks of the Kaiparowits
contain perhaps "the best and most continuous record of Late
Cretaceous terrestrial life in the world." The plateau has been
described as a "stony, desiccated maze of canyons," with few
isolated springs and a handful of creeks. It is a land of broad canyons,
sheer cliffs, red hills of oxidized rock created by underground coal
fires, and soils poisonous to most plants. But it is also a land of
forested, level benches, thousand-year-old junipers, and a rich variety of
mammals and birds, including seventeen species of raptors that ride the
ever-present winds.
The 42-mile-long Straight Cliffs mark the
eastern edge of the plateau, ending at Fiftymile Mountain in the
southeast. Nowhere else in this remarkable monument do the words wind,
space, solitude, silence, and distance have as much meaning as here.
To the north of Fiftymile Bench is the
Aquarius Plateau, dominated by the 11,000-foot Boulder Mountain. To the
east lies an expanse of pale Navajo sandstone which the Escalante River
and its tributaries, flowing down from the plateau, have carved into a
maze of canyons. In this arid territory, it is ironically water that has
done the most to shape the landscape.
But this land of rock surprises: deep in
the canyons along sun-dappled streams, lush riparian worlds flourish.
Cottonwoods, box elder, willows, Gambel's oak, and the introduced tamarisk
form often impenetrable thickets. Shaded alcoves and undercut rock faces
reveal hanging gardens, nourished by dripping seeps.
Entry into the national monument is by two
paved roads: Highway 89 from the Kanab/Big Water area and Highway 12 from
Escalante/Boulder area. All other roads are fairly primitive and remote.
For more information on camping and other
activities in the Grand Stair Case National Monument Click
Here.
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