The Grand Staircase

A few miles down the Cottonwood Road from Kodachrome State Park, you get a colorful view of parts of the Grand Staircase.

While the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument's purpose is to preserve wilderness and provide access, said access does not have to be easy. In fact, the Monument has remarkably little pavement, and relatively few roads of any sort. However, there is actually a paved, ADA-compliant sidewalk at the Grosvenor Arch in the monument.

I spent most of a day exploring the lower stretches of Hackberry Canyon. This canyon contains a tributary of the Paria River, and features walls hundreds of feet high near the lower end. I hiked in about 5 miles, to the location of an old mining prospector's cabin. The stream meanders from side to side in the canyon, but was quite shallow, so hiking in the stream was not a difficult proposition, and the greenery in the canyon was quite pretty. (As I sit at home composing this, I have been reading Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, in which he lyrically describes rafting down Glen Canyon before it was dammed. It was so named by John Wesley Powell because the lush greenery of the side canyons reminded him of, well, wooded glens.)