ESCALANTE, UT

Our first stop today was Utah’s Anasazi State Park Museum where we learned about the Anasazi.  These village-dwelling farmers existed in the southern Colorado Plateau of the Four Corners region of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and southern Nevada between about A.D. 1 and 1300.  We watched a movie and viewed the exhibits in the museum before walking outside to see the 6 room replica and the excavation.  Major excavations were undertaken here by the University of Utah in 1958 and 1959 which uncovered 97 rooms, 10 pit structures, and hundreds of thousands of artifacts.  We were able to see outlines of unexcavated rooms and a reproduction of one L-shaped above-ground building.

Then on to Utah’s most recent addition to protected lands by President Bill Clinton’s proclamation in 1996, The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.  The monument is partly named for the Escalante River Canyons which begin on the edge of Boulder Mountain and end at the Colorado River. When early geologists saw the cliffs and plateaus rising 6,000 feet from the north rim of the Grand Canyon to Bryce Canyon, they called it the Grand Staircase.  We saw huge expanses of red-orange canyons, cliffs, rivers, and high-desert plateaus.

The next day we drove Hell’s Backbone, a road that is considered one of the most dramatic stretches of road in Utah as it travels along a ridge with a sheer drop on both sides.  It is gravel and only about one and a half lanes wide.  We started the 45 mile loop and at the beginning we saw the same scenery we saw as we drove into Escalante yesterday.  Four deer were spotted enjoying a stroll thought the trees and we were lucky enough to get pictures and a video.  As we climbed the types of trees changed (near the top we even saw Aspens that were changing color already) as did the fact that the road narrowed even more and there were drop-offs on at least one side if not both and they were SHEAR drop-offs!  Judy was NOT comfortable.  When we approached the ‘top’ of this climb we arrived at Hell’s Backbone Bridge which spans a crevasse on a narrow ridge no wider than the bridge itself.  This trip was VERY DRAMATIC and Judy was very relieved when we got back to ‘ground’ level!  The weather was perfect, at the top it was 63 degrees and in the mid seventies the balance of the day.