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Grand
Staircase National Monument
Picture
Provided By Utah BLM
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. 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.
Click
here for hotel reservations in Kanab UT, just minutes from the Grand
Staircase National Monument.
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