Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

Welcome to Escalante, gateway to one of the largest and most contested landscapes in the American West. In September of nineteen ninety six, President Bill Clinton stood at the rim of the Grand Canyon and signed a proclamation creating Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, setting aside roughly one point seven million acres of southern Utah in a single stroke. It was a watershed moment.

This was the first national monument ever entrusted to the Bureau of Land Management rather than the National Park Service, and it signaled a bold new use of the Antiquities Act, the old law that lets a president protect federal land by proclamation. The monument stitched together three great regions. To the west rises the Grand Staircase itself, a series of cliffs and plateaus that climb like colossal steps from the Grand Canyon toward Bryce.

In the middle lies the Kaiparowits Plateau, a remote expanse of coal seams and fossil beds that has yielded dozens of dinosaur species new to science. And to the east runs the canyon country of the Escalante River, a maze of slickrock and slot canyons. Many local residents opposed the designation, fearing lost jobs in ranching, mining, and timber, and the fact that it was announced far away rather than in Utah left lasting resentment.

The boundaries did not stay fixed. In December of two thousand seventeen, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation cutting the monument by more than eight hundred thousand acres, nearly in half, splitting it into smaller units and opening freed land to potential mining and grazing. Conservation groups, scientists, and tribal nations challenged the reduction in federal court, arguing that the Antiquities Act lets a president create monuments but not shrink them.

Before those cases were decided, President Joe Biden reversed course. In October of two thousand twenty one, he issued a proclamation restoring the monument to its earlier boundaries, once again protecting the full sweep of cliffs, plateaus, and canyons. The debate over who controls this land, and for what purpose, is far from settled.

But as you drive these roads, you are passing through a living laboratory of geology and paleontology, and a place whose very name carries more than a century of argument about the meaning of public land.