Pete Poston's Colorado Plateau Homepage

Grand Staircase - Escalante Canyons Nat'l Monument

"Frankly, I don't know if there is a more delightful sensation on the planet, after walking across miles of open waterless terrain, than descending into one of the canyons of the Escalante, hearing the gentle luffing of cottonwood leaves, and the hidden voices of birds. Seeing the ranks of coyote willow - unbranched wands with linear, bright green leaves - gracefully waving in unison to a downcanyon breeze, vivid green contrasting sharply with russet rock, cool moisture with the surrounding desert. At these moments there is nowhere else in the world a sane person could wish to be."
-Thomas Lowe Fleischner, "Singing Stone: A Natural History of the Escalante Canyons"

"Under a wine-dark sky I walk through light reflected and re-reflected from the walls and floor of the canyon, a radiant golden light that glows on rock and stream, sand and leaf in varied hues of amber, honey, whiskey - the light that never was is here, now, in the storm-sculptured gorge of the Escalante."

-Edward Abbey, "Desert Solitaire"

Source of great controversy, especially among the inhabitants of the Southern Utah town of Kanab, the new Grand Staircase - Escalante Canyons National Monument is a great victory for environmentalists. If you have any question about the beauty and wilderness quality of the area, visit the Grand Staircase, Kaiparowits, and Escalante links from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. You can find photographic highlights and links to this page below. In addition, SUWA has an online article concerning the history, politics, and ecology of the Kaiparowits that you should read. Another useful link which contains a good overview of the formation of the monument is found at the Utah Public Lands Research Page by Richard M. Warnick. Ray Wheeler has an excellent description of the entire Colorado Plateau, complete with beautiful photographs of the area, as part of the page Land Use History of the Colorado Plateau Homepage at Northern Arizona University. The Utah BLM has the Approved Management Plan on the web also.

There used to be an official City of Kanab viewpoint on the web that has since been taken off after the tourist business picked up. To be fair however, the City (and County) was concerned about the economic impact due to loss of mining jobs, increased burden on the city operating budget because of diversion of funds to Search and Rescue efforts, and loss of revenue to Utah schoolchildren because the mine is located on school trust lands. You might want to look at this page put out by the Utah Geological Survey concerning the Preliminary Accessment of Energy & Mineral Resources found in the Kaiparowits. Compare the map of the monument given at the top of this section to the map of coal reserves furnished by the Utah Geological Survey. The Salt Lake Tribune has an interesting archive of articles relating to the monument that you might want to look at also.

Finally, I would like to show some views of the monument by linking to the SUWA pages referred to above. Click on the thumbnail to view a larger image and to obtain more information about the locality. Click on the location above each thumbnail for information about that particular wilderness unit. All of the links are copyrighted by SUWA and the photo copyrights are listed below each image.