“The road was just graded in the last few days,” the ranger informed us. “Why are you smiling Mike?” Louise asked. If an adventurer ever visits the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah and hears the words, graded road, one must go! The Grand-Escalante Staircase is the largest monument in the United States at 1.9 million acres; much of it is remote, wild, backcountry. Hundreds of miles of dirt roads crisscross the open desert, plateaus, and mesas of the monument. Flash floods and the arid weather of the southwest hammer many of these roads. When we heard the Hole in the Rock Road was graded, we made our way along this 60-mile dirt two track.
The Hole in the Rock Road was originally a trail created by Mormons asked to settle the southeastern corner of the state in the mid 1800s. The expedition turned into quite the ordeal with weather and the realization that had to blast a “hole” in...
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