Red Canyon, Bryce Canyon,

North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and Zion Canyon

with The World Outdoors (www.theworldoutdoors.com)

(September 2002)

Introduction

Note: These 3 hikes were my first trips with The World Outdoors and I quickly made them my #1 choice for hiking vacations. I had 6 different guides on the 3 trips and they were ALL superb. This company and the guides I hiked with are far superior to other companies I have experienced. I currently plan to do 3 more of their trips in 2003! 

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The hoodoos were carved from the Claron formations. Its rock was deposited by the ancient lakes, streams, and rivers over a period of 20 million years. Today’s state shapes are shown for reference.   

The Colorado Plateau

From Browns Point, at the southeastern rim of the 11,000-foot-high Aquarius Plateau, you can see out over the landscape of southern Utah with the perspective of an Olympian god. In every direction the land falls away in thousand-foot leaps, dropping a vertical mile before finally losing itself in a chaos of mesas, buttes, cliff-walls, terraces, domes, amphitheaters, hogbacks, and canyons. Gigantic landforms rise off that desert floor. To the south, a cliff-wall 2,000 feet high and 50 miles long points like a semaphore at 10,000 foot -high Navajo Mountain. To the east, the purple domes of the Henry Mountains hover above the mesas and badlands which surround them. A 1,000 -foot-high hogback called the Waterpocket Fold shoots across the field of view from south to north, its jagged crestline running straight as an arrow for nearly 100 miles. Forty miles away to the northeast, you can see the 35 -mile-wide dome called the San Rafael Swell.

Closer at hand lies a 100,00-acre amphitheater ringed by the thousand -foot-high Circle Cliffs. Still closer, to the south and southeast, lies the labyrinthine canyon system of the Escalante River.

The Colorado Plateau is in fact a huge basin ringed by highlands filled with plateaus. Sprawling across southeastern Utah , northern Arizona , northwestern New Mexico, and western Colorado , the Colorado Plateau covers 130,000 square miles. Geologically, the Colorado Plateau is perhaps best defined by what did not happen to  it. While the Rocky Mountains to the east and the basin and range country to the west were being thrust, stretched, and fractured into existence, the Colorado Plateau remained structurally intact.

Between 1900 and 1972, the government created 23 national parks, monuments, recreation areas, and landmarks on the Colorado Plateau. Unfortunately, the National Park System protects only 5 million acres-- barely 7 percent of the land area of the Colorado Plateau. The Plateau's national parks are islands of protected land surrounded by publicly owned wild lands which remain open to development. There are several large Indian reservations and small holdings of state and private lands at the wild core of the Colorado Plateau. But most of the lands which surround the Plateau's national parks are controlled by the Bureau of Land Management.

Red Canyon (located in the Dixie National Forest)

The Dixie National Forest occupies almost two million acres and stretches for about 170 miles across southern Utah between the Great Basin and the Colorado River. There are three sections of the Forest and each section encompasses a major plateau--Markagunt, Paunsaugunt, and Aquarius--with elevations ranging from approximately 6,000 to over 10,000 feet. The Aquarius Plateau is believed to be the highest plateau in North America.

Red Canyon, one of the most spectacular colored cliff canyons in southern Utah is located in the Paunsaugunt section of the forest about 10 miles west of Bryce Canyon National Park. Indeed Red Canyon looks very much like Bryce Canyon with limestone Hoodoo formations. Visitors can experience its brilliant red spires and cliffs by car or by hiking one of the nature trails in the canyon. In this unique environment, weather sculpted formations of Wasatch limestone are contrasted by giant ponderosa pines.

pictures of Red Canyon

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 Bryce Canyon  -  North Rim of the Grand Canyon  -  Zion Canyon

for pictures of other vacations return to the Vacation Photos page