At the head of the trail leading to Spooky Slot Canyon, a popular destination in southern Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a warning sign posted between two narrowly arranged steel beams announces: “If you have trouble fitting your body between these posts, DO NOT PROCEED THROUGH SPOOKY GULCH. You may become STUCK and need rescue.” The 12-year-old on our hike squeezed through the stanchions face-forward, but the rest of us had to do a side shimmy; later that afternoon, deep inside Spooky, I bruised a shoulder while trying to negotiate its twists and turns.
From the moment, decades ago, when a cousin told me “God was on drugs when he made Utah,” I’ve wanted to go there. I’m a New Yorker of long-standing vintage, but the great national parks of the American West have always attracted me. And while I’ve explored Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and others, Utah still proved elusive. Finally, with a big birthday to celebrate, I booked a family base-camp trip with a hiking tour company.
Think of base-camping as backpacking for beginners: Because you’re hiking in and out of just one camp, you only need to carry the water and snacks you’re bringing along for the day—not your sleeping bag, mattress pad, tent, and other overnight gear. Still, there was a certain amount of training required in the lead-up to the trip: as many 10,000-step days as we all could manage (I walked the two miles from our East Village apartment to work), along with a good week of pre-hydrating.
While I remain iffy on the divine, once we arrived in Utah I found myself somehow agreeing with my cousin’s youthful impression: The southern part of the state in particular is a magical place, a natural amusement park of mesas, arches, and hoodoos (columns of weathered rock) wrought by millions of years of tectonic uplift and erosion. Five national parks span the state’s southern border—Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, and Arches. Grand Staircase-Escalante is a roughly two-million-acre territory wedged between Bryce and Capitol Reef and named for its massive sequence of sedimentary rock layers, with one cliff-and-plateau following another.
In addition to its slot canyons—deep, narrow gorges carved by millions of years of eroding water—the area is known for an abundance of Native American cultural sites and pictographs, dinosaur fossils (our guide showed us a few only after we promised to keep the location secret), the spectacular 126-foot Lower Calf Creek Falls, a petrified forest, and the Box-Death Hollow Wilderness, said to have earned its moniker from the tendency of mules on a long-ago mail route to fall into its steep canyons. And that’s just what’s under your feet. As one of the darkest spots in the lower 48, Grand Staircase-Escalante is also a mecca for stargazers, with much of its acreage ranked as Bortle Class 1—meaning that on clear nights the Milky Way is bright enough to cast noticeable shadows and even appears to have three dimensions. (In July and August, you can watch the Perseids dart across the sky like fireflies.)
