Scenery for a million miles at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
Is 1.8 million acres big enough for you? That’s the size of sprawling Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, one of our stops on our spring RV trip out west.
Utah felt like one big park to us — it contains 5 national parks plus 8 national monuments — with jaw-dropping vistas of snow-capped mountains, red rock mesas, striated canyons, and weirdly formed hoodoos at every bend in the road.
In late April, spring wildflowers added patches of purple that popped against the terracotta rock.
The staircase of Grand Staircase (“escalante” is Spanish for “climbing”) refers to a vast area of geologic uplift that “steps up” from the Grand Canyon in Arizona to Bryce Canyon in Utah. Uplift and erosion make it possible to read the history of the earth here and see how its climate and flora and fauna evolved over the ages.
You can’t help feeling small at Grand Staircase, just a tiny blip in Earth’s staggeringly ancient history. Mountain ranges and seas have risen and fallen, a tropical climate evaporated to desert. Unimaginable creatures roamed this changing landscape for millions of years and then died out, making room for new life forms. The earth endures, changing in time with its own eons-per-tick geologic clock, with or without us.
It’s a place to look, ponder, wonder at, and open yourself to.
Up next: Petroglyphs, orchards, and pie at Capitol Reef National Park. For a look back at Part 1 and Part 2 of my visit to Red Hills Desert Garden in St. George, Utah, click here.
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Digging Deeper
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It’s an amazing landscape, one of the places on Earth that exposes such ancient history. The Earth – what an incredible planet!
The more I see of it, the more awe I feel.
“…eons-per-tick geologic clock”! Very well said. Easy to feel insignificant in the midst of such natural splendor.
You mentioned the “unimaginable creatures” that roamed the landscape, and it got me thinking: were you anywhere near an area where dinosaurs bones are found?
Yes, this whole region is a gold mine for dinosaur fossils. We also stopped at Dinosaur National Monument, and I’ll have a post about that soon.
I had never heard of the Grand Staircase before, that’s just fascinating! I appreciate the graph showing each one in relation to the others.
I had not heard of it before this trip either, Robin.