Utah. Again. Part Three.

Grand Staircase/ Escalante National Monument is HUGE. We are talking 1,888,461 acres huge. It takes up a sizable chunk of the map of Utah. And as these monuments go, it is relatively new, set aside by your friend and mine, Bill Clinton. It is not quite ready for prime time as a place to visit, meaning not too well marked, not too groomed. This is, for most people who go there, exactly the point. It takes a bit of a sense of adventure. Not to mention a sense of humor.

It has this long unwieldy name because in geologic terms (uh oh, here she goes with the rocks again), the landscape in this area is one long staircase from the bottom of the Grand Canyon at the lowest point, to Bryce Canyon at the top, and much of this staircase occurs inside these 1.8 million acres. Actually, the monument includes three separate areas: the Grand Staircase, the Kaparowits Plateau, and the Canyons of Escalante. Right now I'm feeling pretty glad they didn't name it the Grand Staircase/Kaiparowits/Escalante National Monument. The name it has is hard enough. Most things seem to be labeled GSENM, which is at least shorter, if still not intuitive.

What makes this place so different from some of the places we have visited is just the vast spaces and  the remoteness of what is out here. There are three central things about visiting here: great distances between one site and another; enormously difficult terrain anywhere but on the TWO paved roads (only two paved roads!), Highway 89 and Highway 12, which go across roughly the top and the bottom of the monument; and the remoteness of the sites, which must be almost unrivaled in the lower 48 states. When the places you want to see are about 50 miles apart, and most involve unpaved roads and difficult hiking, it pretty quickly separates the visitors into two distinct groups: one filled with rock climbers, hikers and adventure lovers, and one filled with people who don't know what the hell they are doing. Can you guess which group we are in?

We saw some awesome pictures of these slot canyons that looked to be about an hour's drive away. Slot canyons are canyon walls that are so close together that it involves walking between two tall rock walls, and sometimes crawling through tight spaces to get inside other such canyons. The ranger assured us that it wasn't so hard. So, off we went, ready for challenge, and longing for adventure.

After we left the highway, we started on a road which goes across the terrain for about 50 miles. It is a real road, on the map and everything, unpaved but allegedly not a "bad" road. Guess what? It is a "washboard" road, which means there are grooves across the road every few inches, and it feels like a test of whether any of your dental fillings are likely to need to be replaced anytime soon. It feels like a way to discover exactly where every bone in your body is, and how it is doing. We had to drive on the road for 26 miles. This took about an hour and a half. Afterward, I wasn't sure if I needed to go to a chiropractor, or had just been to one.

Then we got to a place where you should park if you don't have 4 wheel drive, but you can keep going for another mile to park closer,  if you do. Of course, rather than walk an extra mile in the relentless sun, we kept going. What a ride! There were a few times when the car was so tilted on one side that I had to close my eyes and hold my breath. But we made it! Now all we had to do was walk for a mile, to get near the slot canyons, across this terrain:

Looking across at the hike. First we have to get to the bottom.

And then walk across and down some surfaces that look like this:

Hard to say which was harder, going down, or going up. This is looking up.

When we were lucky there were (sort of) steps to walk up or down. Or across.

Sometimes the walk was straight down, and sometimes it was on the very edge. Just as I was feeling like saying,  "really? Are you kidding me?" I had, more than once, to step aside to let some group of young studs and young women, looking for all the world like they are out for a stroll, breeze by.

Then, EVENTUALLY, we got  to the bottom and had to walk about another half mile to discover THIS:

Inside the easiest of the slot canyons

It was so beautiful and cool inside

I didn't feel claustrophobic, because the sky is open above

The blueness of the sky again the red rock was just spectacular

Inside the slot canyon, it was shady and cool, and beautiful. You can walk for several miles and just enjoy how unusual and beautiful it is. But after we walked for awhile, we started thinking about the walk BACK, straight up those walls or up the sandy hillsides, and then eventually to our car, and then the 26 mile unpaved road. It made it hard to keep going!

We had heard that a second slot canyon, called "Peekaboo," was also quite nearby. This one is much tighter, and apparently more interesting, but involves climbing a 12 foot wall "using hand and foot holds on the rock." We decide to have a look, to see what such a thing would look like. It was RIDICULOUS.

Do you see those very convenient foot and hand holds?

Bob started to try to go up, but it's almost impossible if you don't do this thing as a hobby. And inside, we heard someone falling,  "Aaaaaaarrrrggghh!!!!" I could just imagine a man on his back, and no way to get to him, and that dreadful walk back to even tell anyone. But it turned out that he only slid down a wall into a mud puddle, and he was okay, if muddy up to his calf.

So...never mind.  Interesting. Challenging. But not for us.We walked back out, back up up up and then across, up, and across. And then.....back to the car. And then 26 miles of teeth clattering road. Then the road back to our trailer. And then.....two completely opposite feelings: I am woman, hear me roar! And......what the hell was a person like me doing out there?

Next: on to Bryce Canyon, a no less spectacular (perhaps even more spectacular) but somewhat more "civilized" kind of place.