Qualla: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument: Introduction

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Inklein, CC BY-SA 3.0. It was the last landscape mapped in the contiguous United States. When cartographers finally filled in this blank spot on the American map, what they found was 1.7 million acres of southern Utah so remote and so rugged that it had simply resisted all attempts at documentation. The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument protects three distinct regions -- the Grand Staircase, the Kaiparowits Plateau, and the Canyons of the Escalante -- each one a geological library written in stone, bone, and deep time. Established in 1996 by President Bill Clinton under the Antiquities Act, it became the first and largest national monument managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The land is slightly larger in area than the state of Delaware.

Image: Inklein | CC BY-SA 3.0

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument: Bones in the Plateau

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wolfgang Staudt from Saarbruecken, Germany, CC BY 2.0. The Kaiparowits Plateau dominates the monument's center, a single long ridge called Fifty-Mile Mountain when viewed from the east, its face dropping in a sheer escarpment toward Glen Canyon and the Colorado River. Beneath its surface lies one of the richest fossil beds in North A...

Image: Wolfgang Staudt from Saarbruecken, Germany | CC BY 2.0

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument: Hole in the Rock

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA, CC BY 2.0. Humans settled permanently here around AD 500, during the Basketmaker III Era. Both the Fremont people and ancestral Puebloans made their lives in these canyons, growing corn, beans, and squash, building brush-roofed pithouses, and sheltering beneath the natural rock overhangs. B...

Image: John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA | CC BY 2.0

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument: A Monument Born in Controversy

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Light, CC BY-SA 4.0. The monument was declared on September 18, 1996, during the height of the presidential election campaign, and controversy attended it from the first moment. Clinton held the declaration ceremony at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona rather than in Utah, a choice that stung. Lo...

Image: Chris Light | CC BY-SA 4.0

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument: Shrunk, Restored, Contested

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Public domain. In December 2017, President Donald Trump ordered the monument reduced by nearly 47%, and the administration subsequently approved logging and coal mining in the excluded areas. Conservation and outdoor recreation groups filed suit immediately. On his first day in office in 2021, ...

Image: Bureau of Land Management (BLM) | Public domain