This High Desert Heaven Is America’s Top Adventure Getaway

Draw an imaginary line through the middle of any U.S. state and its two halves could often pass for different planets—as Los Angeles and Redwood City, Seattle and Walla Walla, or Flushing and the Finger Lakes will confirm. Head a few hundred miles south of Salt Lake City for a three-day, midsummer hiking, glamping, UTVing, and horse riding adventure in Bryce Canyon Country, and it soon becomes clear that Utah is quietly winning America’s starkest two-states-in-one contest.

On any given day, the tidy grid of Utah’s capital, with its neatly numbered avenues, Temple Square, State Capitol-crowned hilltop, and sprawl of neighboring salt flats presents one perspective of the Beehive State. But beeline down I-15 and onto Scenic Byway 12 for a spin through Bryce Canyon Country’s 5,200 square miles, where a whole other galaxy awaits: high desert plateaus, labyrinthine canyons, outlandish rock formations, and quirky small communities serving two of the most mind-bending units in the National Park System—Bryce Canyon National Park and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Home to an elite group of national parks known as the Mighty Five (Bryce Canyon, Zion, Arches, Canyonlands, and Capitol Reef), southwestern Utah is covered in the sort of geology that’s impossible to get your head around—in a good way. During a 72-hour Bryce blitz, plunging into this primordial puzzle with your eyes trying catch up with the rest of you is the fun.

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“We wanna be thinking slow and steady in the canyons—yoga, not ninja,” Rick Green tells our small group of canyoneering newbies gathered for a safety briefing at the headquarters of Excursions of Escalante, which runs guided hikes through some of southwestern Utah’s most remote and unruly rockscapes. “Think feet, not hands; baby steps, not superhero jumps. Because a busted ankle will really suck down there.”

Green glances at our footwear. “How are everyone’s hips and knees?” he asks rhetorically (hopefully okay, as we’ll be needing them today), while his yellow lab Norman trots around the room sniffing legs.

If there are any pre-hike jitters among the group, Green is quick to put them to rest. “Once you’re dialed in, it’s so much fun down there,” he assures us of the yoga-stepping, heel-locking, butt-sliding, squeezing, bridging, belaying, and other upcoming canyoneering verbs in the innards of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

An American Canyoneering Association-certified instructor and Escalante search and rescue commander, Green has been leading customized canyon trips through hidden pockets of Grand Staircase-Escalante for nearly three decades. He's definitely the right guide in the right place.

Excursions of Escalante’s homey Main Street headquarters in downtown Escalante, UT, with a population of 821-ish, is stocked accordingly with climbing and canyoneering gear, espresso and homemade ice cream stations, and a wad of autographed dollar bills (“Rick, You Rock!”) pinned to the ceiling from ecstatic former clients.

While co-owner Amie Fortin (Green’s partner in all respects) equips us with climbing harnesses, helmets, and bomb-proof boxed lunches, Green ends his safety talk on a note that never fails to prick up ears on an overcast day in canyon country with a forecast of scattered showers.

“Up in the mountains, they talk about avalanches. Down here in the canyons, we need to discuss flash floods—because three minutes of rain is all it takes in certain areas,” he says. “It’s a killer.”

Today, according to local weather sources, there’s about a 90 percent chance of flash flooding happening somewhere in Escalante’s vast, twisted canyon complex. The good news is that the place we’re headed to is a pretty safe bet with plenty of emergency exits. Excursions of Escalante’s canyoneering tours veer far from the monument’s most popular stops in favor of its farther-flung hideaways—places that Green has trailblazed over many years, including the canyon we’ll be exploring today. He promises it’ll blow us away.

“Whaddaya say?” says Green, ending the morning's solemn safety chat on an upbeat. “Let’s go play.”

The Fissure King

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is a playground of epic proportions, encompassing nearly two million acres of rambunctious rockscapes that pick up where its westerly neighbor Bryce Canyon National Park leaves off. The monument stretches all the way northeast to Canyonlands National Park and south to the Utah-Arizona border. Its stone mazes and razor-thin slot canyons were the last place in the Lower 48 to be mapped, our guide tells us. That’s a tough fact to verify, but plausible enough.

“There’s still only one established trail in this entire monument,” says Green, driving us deep into a secluded pocket tucked at the far end of a winding red dirt road that won’t see another vehicle today. “The rest of this entire place is completely choose-your-own-adventure.”

Our adventure begins in a secluded drainage east of Escalante flanked by reddish hills and a secret canyon that Green calls one of his favorite places in the world. To the untrained eye, this signless “trailhead” with no trail on a ruddy sprawl of mesa carpeted in juniper and sagebrush could rightfully be confused with the absolute middle of nowhere.

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“Prepare to be amazed,” says Green, leading the way across a brushscape paved in flat, smooth stones that look transported from an ocean floor. In fact, for millions of years, this place was part of a massive, shallow sea. Fish, turtles, and sharks once roamed these high-altitude hiking grounds pushing 8,500 feet of elevation in some spots. Now, they’re honeycombed with surprise sandstone gorges like the massive one suddenly appearing in front of our dusty shoes.

“Slow and steady,” says Green, leading the way down.

As we make our yoga-not-ninja descent through a network of winding gullies—narrowing, widening, and narrowing again like an accordion—rivulets of water appear here and there. They hit mid-calf at one point.

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“What’s this canyon called?” someone in the group asks, as if to stop and avoid a soaker.

“AFC,” says Green, splashing his La Sportivas straight into the drink without hesitation. No, not the NFL conference. The name stands for “Amie’s Favorite Canyon” (as in Rick’s Amie). If there’s an official name for this remote cleft, no one knows it. And if anyone deserves to be naming these spots, it’s Green. Well before Grand Staircase-Escalante was granted national monument status in 1996, he was deep into this place, pioneering its inner sanctums solo.

“I’d head out here with a single rope and descend as far as I could,” he says. “Then I’d go home and grab another rope and head down a little farther.”

Rope by rope, Green inched his way into the jaws of Escalante, making fast friends with the place. Soon he was introducing it to visitors. He’s been running tours in the warmer months from late spring through early fall ever since.

Midway into our AFC descent, we hit the day’s first slot. A flagship feature of Grand Staircase-Escalante, slot canyons are defined as narrow fissures of eroded sedimentary rock with a depth-to-width ratio of at least 10:1. The monument’s monster slots can reach up to ten times that proportion. Nobody has a measuring tape today, but this one is a serious sideways-turner, thinning to about 10 inches, and towering high enough above our helmets to turn the sky into a thin strip of sunless blue that you can block with an index finger.

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Sculpted by eons of flooding and erosion, Escalante’s sandstone canvas is most remarkable in these tight contours of rock tinted in a mood swing of palettes from glowing yellows and oranges to dour purply browns. Their tapered beauty is halting, especially for canyoneering tenderfoots constricted into stick figure mode.

“Use the wall instead of fighting it—otherwise it’ll win every time,” guides Green, as we wedge our way in and out of the day’s tightest turns.

The geological drama heightens even more when we come to a ledge above a sheer 30-foot cliff, which leads to another ledge and cliff, and another, and another. The tiered abyss stretches beyond our view with no apparent bottom. Earlier this week, Green tells us, he rappelled 400 feet into this impressive void. “And I could’ve kept going.”

Today, we’ll settle for 30 feet.

Setting up a belay anchored to an old pinyon pine, Green orchestrates what many in the group will count as their first ever rappel.

“Feet hip-width apart, shoulders back—now step. You got this,” our belayer coaches from the top of the cliff. “Give it some more lean. Trust the equipment—and yourself… there you go. Now loosen that kung fu grip ... Finish strong. Nice!”

Soon, the entire group has safely rappelled to the next ledge and is happily huddled for lunch at two basement levels deep in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument—proving that, under the right circumstances, walking backward down a cliff while roped to a gnarled evergreen is every bit as fun as it may not totally sound.

“Did I promise you?” says Green. “Next time, we’ll go to the bottom.”

Life Under Canvas

Bryce Canyon Country isn’t short on private and public campgrounds of all kinds to tent it for the night in a spectacular spot in the high rocks. On the lavish end of that spectrum is Under Canvas Bryce Canyon.

If your preferred mode of “roughing it” leans glamp-y after an intense day in the slots and cliffs of nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante, Under Canvas’s newest outpost has you covered. Perched on 750 acres of pine-forested high plain just 15 minutes from Bryce Canyon National Park, the luxury camp offers safari-style lodging appointed with plush beds and West Elm furniture, funky pull-chain showers and EO soaps, wood-burning stoves and extra kindling, plus a thoughtful s’mores kit for fireside evenings segueing into starry nights and cappuccino mornings—all in a cozy, natural setting that still feels sufficiently out there.

“Wild animals will find any food you leave in your tent,” we’re advised in the property’s sleek tented lobby at check-in. Also, showers and low-flow toilets are designed for water conservation, low-level lighting is for curbing light pollution, and Wi-Fi? Fuggetaboutit. “We’re completely off-grid,” our UC concierge informs us unapologetically, all in keeping with the Under Canvas ethos: Unplugging equals recharging.

In the camp’s main outdoor lounge area, families are playing cornhole. Friends are kicking back around firepits. Folks are connecting, counting elk scattered across a broad valley framed by distant mountains. Not a single soul is staring dead-eyed at TikTok or Instagram.

Under Canvas locations now stretch from Yellowstone to Maine’s Acadia National Park to the Great Smoky Mountains. A cluster of them in and around southern Utah comprises an 1,100-mile “Grand Circle,” where glamping road-trippers can leapfrog to UC camps in Moab, Zion, Bryce, Lake Powell-Grand Staircase, and Grand Canyon.

After a hot shower in a sleek Stargazer Tent and a late-afternoon snooze lulled by swaying shadows of pine branches screening on the canvas wall, my al fresco dinner back at the main lodge includes Utah ale, spiced trout with farro, braised greens, stewed local peppers, and a square of très leches cake under an emerging night sky of high-beam constellations that would never deign to show up back home in Los Angeles.

Time your visit in mid-to-late summer during the peak of the Perseids annual meteor shower, and the celestial show at one of the world’s first DarkSky resorts will truly blow your mind. “You should’ve been here during the real peak a few days ago,” a silhouetted crane-necked figure from a neighboring tent pipes in. “It was a shooting star every two seconds.”

Anyway, tonight’s spectacle of burning comet cloud debris is sufficiently astonishing. It leads to one of the best pine-scented sleeps I’ve had in a while—followed by the toughest decision of my stay at Under Canvas Bryce Canyon the following morning: light or heavy foam cappuccino?

Blazing Through Bryce Canyon

Singling out one must-see national park in a state that includes the red-rock Eden of Zion, the mesa mazes of Canyonlands, the dramatic depths of Capitol Reef, and the arches of Arches is not only an impossible decision but a totally avoidable one by doing the sensible thing and just seeing all of them. That said, if you have one last day in these parts and are forced to choose, the most audience-friendly rock show of the bunch goes to Bryce Canyon National Park—and not only because the Bryce Canyon Wranglers will be performing every night all summer long just down the road at Ebenezer’s Barn & Grill in neighboring Bryce Canyon City. But if you’re a fan of Hank, Dolly, Willie, Waylon, Patsy, Johnny, and George Strait covers, that’s an added evening bonus.

Southwestern Utah’s most ambitious geology crescendos in this faux canyon (technically, it’s a weather-beaten plateau slope) named after a local 19th-century rancher named Ebenezer Bryce who famously quipped that “it’s a helluva place to lose a cow.” The park’s centerpiece is an amphitheater of multihued spires featuring the world’s greatest concentration of hoodoos (slender towers of rock with physics-defying bulbous tops) and a trifecta of park rim overlooks called—you guessed it—Sunrise Point, Sunset Point, and Inspiration Point that screams “tour bus crowd.”

You can escape the tourist throngs easily enough on 50 miles of hiking trails that start at the park’s 8,000-foot rim and descend into its remarkable red maze. Or you can swing a leg over a saddle with Canyon Trail Rides and let a dashing young guide and self-proclaimed former pro rodeo star named Blaze lead you through Bryce on horseback.

“If you get scared on the way down, just close your eyes,” says Blaze, opening a can of jokes for the two-hour tour on the park’s designated equine trail. “That’s what the horses do.”

Stunning rock formations and precipitous drops lope by (a few precious inches from our horses’ outside hooves), becoming increasingly dramatic during the ride. So do Blaze’s yarns about his rodeo conquests across the West. Eventually, the handsome cowboy returned to his hometown of Tropic, he says, to lead horse trips through neighboring Bryce Canyon National Park—presumably because all the golden buckles in the world couldn’t keep him away from this incredible place. This may be at least semi-true, though it's hard to shake the suspicion that Blaze, with his spotless cowboy hat, wild mane of hair, and king-sized drawl, is actually a struggling actor from Brooklyn. It's best not to question it.

“If you look at that rock face up there and tilt your head, you’ll see Robin Williams in a gray wig,” Blaze drawls, pointing at a peak which does indeed resemble Mrs. Doubtfire. “This one here is Seal Cathedral,” he says, pointing to a series of spires that really do look like pinniped heads. "Or if you have a greater imagination like me, three longneck bottles of beer.”

Soon the guide gags and rodeo stories fade into the majesty of Bryce Canyon and the utter privilege of riding a horse through these staggering red rocks accented in deep green pines. It’s a true bucket lister, right up there with sitting on a mule in the Grand Canyon, a mountain bike in Moab, or a massage chair at Salt Lake City International Airport.

“Those color contrasts are the one thing that really sets this area apart from other parts of southern Utah,” says Justin Shakespeare later that day, during a final spin through Bryce Canyon Country with Grand Staircase ATV Tours. “You get those incredible rock formations everywhere and the amazing reds, but not the deep green of the pines like you do at Bryce. Plus, the elevation is higher here,” he adds, “so we have the bluest skies, too.”

Shakespeare (no relation to the Bard) and his wife Bree grew up here in Tropic, UT, and have been running single- and multi-day expeditions for 20 years through the area’s labyrinth of unmarked, off-road trails that you’d never know exist from behind a rental car. The eye-opening ride provides yet another round of gape-worthy moments in Bryce Canyon Country before a reluctant dash back to SLC until next time.

Whizzing us past the empty back gates of Bryce Canyon National Park (a local secret) and up onto a high overlook, Shakespeare leads us to the best bird’s-eye view of Bryce Canyon Country you could ever find without a pair of wings. To the east, vast Grand Staircase-Escalante sprawls like an undulating mirage. In the other direction, a rare westerly view of Bryce Canyon from the backside rivals anything you’d see in the park—even when accompanied by the one and only Blaze, purportedly Tropic’s biggest homegrown rodeo star.

“Blaze?” says Shakespeare, saving the most poetic moment for last. “I grew up in Tropic. I know everybody here. There’s nobody from Tropic named Blaze.” Hah!