Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

we were there in october… it started raining in the morning…in the night we were kept up by coyotes… we decided to do the overland path…crossing 3 canyons and ending up above escalante (town)... we started going down into the first canyon…we were climbing down as the small drops of rain started gathering together in the cracks in the rounded rock, slowly they formed little streams… we met a group of ‘hardcore’ hikers, all dressed in military gear, they were coming up…they said they had tried to cross the canyon but the water had been rising…they waited for 30 mins by the stream and decided to go back….we smiled and said thank you and kept on… by now the water was everywhere around us…above as well as beneath. as we continued going down we could now clearly see waterfalls forming off the edges of the canyon walls, they were huge, we could see 3 or 4 of them… as we reached the canyon botttom, we were sliping and sliding on our asses, laughing like mad men… we reached the stream…it was about a meter deep… our decision…cross fast and start running to get out of the canyon as it was flooding, we crossed the stream/river , my 7$ waterproof pants just tore at the crotch, i was soaking wet now… we started running, we could see waterfalls all around us… suddenly a deafening sound approached, louder than a landing chopper… we came around the corner and there was a huge waterfall coming down just a few feet from us, we were screaming and shouting to each other but couldn’t hear anything but the sound of the water hitting the bare rock next to us from a free fall of probably some 300-400ft, the wind created by the fall was unbelievable…we pushed on, marveling at the spontenous waterfalls, adrenaline rushing through our veins….we fianly reached the other side and started climbing out of the canyon…amazed at what just happened…shahar had counted 14 waterfalls…each majestic and unique revealing itself just to us… on that cosmic day… from there we kept hiking the turtles’ backs till we reached the camp, after 14 miles of this beautiful, twisted landscape… we realized it was yom kippur, and decided to stay there the next day and fast….but that’s another story… how we ran out of water, meditated on top of rock spires with chipmunks and hitchhiked our way back to the car with 2 half blind, drunk war veterans on their sunday cruising in their 60 something chevy…
when i get ‘home’ i’ll scan some photos in for you…

Thank you President Clinton for sparing this awesome area from being exploited by multinational companies that want to destroy and run.