Escalante

This canyon country has long been part of the homeland of the Southern Paiute people, and the surrounding canyons hold sites left by the Ancestral Puebloan and Fremont peoples, who farmed and hunted here roughly a thousand years ago, leaving granaries and rock art tucked into the cliffs. The Paiute people and their descendants maintain ties to this land today.

Mormon pioneers settled Escalante in the 1870s, naming it for a Spanish friar who had passed through the region a century earlier while searching for a route across the West. The town remained one of the most cut-off communities in Utah for generations. Nearby is the legendary Hole-in-the-Rock, where in 1879 a pioneer expedition blasted and hacked a wagon route down a sheer canyon wall to the Colorado River, one of the most audacious feats of the pioneer era.

The country around Escalante is a sandstone wilderness on a grand scale, part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The Escalante River carves a long canyon through it, joined by countless side canyons, some of them narrow slots where the walls close in until a hiker can touch both sides at once. Waterfalls, natural arches, and hanging gardens hide in these clefts, rewarding those willing to seek them out.

The rock itself is mostly Navajo sandstone, the same fossilized dunes that form the cliffs and domes across southern Utah, sculpted here into swirling slickrock, deep gorges, and smooth-walled canyons. Because so much of it is roadless and remote, the Escalante country offers a rare chance to experience wilderness that feels genuinely untouched, still full of places few people ever reach.

Highway 12, which runs through town, is one of the most celebrated scenic drives in the country, threading across narrow slickrock ridges and climbing over a forested mountain between Escalante and Boulder. Along it and the dirt roads branching off it lie many of the region's highlights, from the popular hike to Lower Calf Creek Falls to the swirling stone of Devils Garden and the slot canyons off the long Hole-in-the-Rock Road.

Escalante makes the natural hub for all of it, close to the Petrified Forest State Park and its reservoir, within reach of Bryce Canyon to the west and Capitol Reef to the east, and surrounded by trailheads. Outfitters in town lead guided canyon trips, and the local knowledge they offer is invaluable in country where a wrong turn can mean a very long day.

The surrounding wilderness supports the tough, quiet life of the high desert. Mule deer and pronghorn range the flats, mountain lions and coyotes hunt the canyons, and the streams and hanging gardens draw songbirds, frogs, and the occasional beaver. Golden eagles and hawks ride the winds above the slickrock. With almost no light for miles, the night skies over Escalante are among the darkest in the nation.

Spring and fall are the prime seasons, mild and clear, ideal for canyon hiking and long scenic drives. Summer is hot in the low canyons and marked by the sudden thunderstorms of the monsoon, which make flash floods a real danger in the slots. Winter is cold and quiet, with snow dusting the slickrock and the mountain pass on Highway 12, and the town settling into a peaceful off-season calm.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.