A Monumental Road Trip: Grand Staircase-Escalante

by mfa-admin | Aug 29, 2017 | Uncategorized

So we decided to take a leap and help defend our national monuments! Over the course of the next few months, we will be visiting threatened national monuments throughout the West.

We want you to come along for the ride. We hope to meet many of the people who worked together to conserve our national heritage along the way. And we hope that you join us in defending our national monuments by making your voices heard here.

A Monumental Road Trip: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument!

“America’s Public Lands Embody Our Common Ground: Heritage, Freedom and Hope for the Future.”

Designated in 1996, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah is a serious powerhouse of amazing vistas, cool landscapes, adventure, science and history. Its designation established it as a monument for scientific research, and the monument continues to wow visitors, provide grand solitude and be a place of novel scientific discovery.

There are over 20,000 archaeological sites in the area. In addition, there are dinosaurs! Twenty-one new dinosaurs have been discovered since 2000. (Sorry, no dinosaur pictures …)

Grand Staircase-Escalante is also home to the Escalante River, one of the last free-flowing rivers in the West. The river felt like the life blood of the monument and has created fantastic washes, canyons and slot canyons that are a joy to explore. While we were there, we traveled to the famous Hole in the Wall Road (it travels from just north of Escalante to Lake Powell) and hiked to Golden Cathedral. It’s a stunning sandstone dome at the end of a narrow canyon with a waterfall that pours through a hole in the ceiling. The hike takes you across high plateau, traverses down a wide canyon to the Escalante river, and then up narrow Neon Canyon. Sitting there looking up at the dome, you can feel the history of the place.

Since President Clinton established the monument in 1996, there has been a continual grumble that the monument has hampered economic growth in the county by closing the area to oil, gas and mineral development. Not surprisingly, the current motivation behind the push to remove or shrink the monument is pressure from the fossil fuel industry.

The reality on the ground was much different. We found that the communities around Grand-Staircase Escalante to be excellent examples of the economic benefit designation of a monument can provide to local communities. Both Boulder and Escalante, Utah, seemed invigorated by the monument. Local businesses have sprouted up clearly as a result of tourist traffic through the area. The Magnolia Street Food bus was parked outside of the visitor’s center and served up killer tacos using local and seasonal ingredients. In addition, one of the best restaurants in America is in Boulder, Utah – Hell’s Backbone Grill & Farm. Blake Spalding, co-owner of Hell’s Backbone, spoke at the This Land is Our Land March in Salt Lake City, UT and extolled the benefits that the monument has brought to the community. We found a similar story in Escalante with cute restaurants, a great natural foods market and tour guide companies. Both communities felt alive and thriving. Nate Waggoner from Escalante Outfitters was recently interviewed on Go West, Young Podcast. He provides a solid local perspective for the economic growth the monument has provided for the local communities. Later, we visited Kanab and saw numerous businesses geared toward the monument there as well.

As the BLM has emphasized about the monument’s archaeological sites, “it is the wholeness of the sites” that makes the monument so valuable. In Red, Passion and Patience in the Desert, Terry Tempest Williams also extolled the monument for its importance as an ecological bridge between National Parks, a bridge between ecological islands. Williams poignantly describes Grand Staircase-Escalante as the “crucial missing puzzle piece that prevents ecological fragmentation.”

Crucially, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument rejoins Bryce National Park to Dixie National Forest and the Box-Death Hollow Wilderness Area, which then weaves Capitol Reef National Park into Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

I don’t know if it was the river, the spirit of the surrounding communities, the canyons or the red desert, but Grand Staircase-Escalante stole our hearts, and it’s a place to which we will return.

As we travel onto our next national monument, I urge you to please help preserve this incredible national monument.  Visit here to take action!

A Monumental Road Trip: Vermilion Cliffs

by mfa-admin | Aug 28, 2017 | Uncategorized

So we decided to take a leap and help defend our national monuments! Over the course of the next few months, we will be visiting threatened national monuments throughout the West.

We want you to come along for the ride. We hope to meet many of the people who worked together to conserve our national heritage along the way. And we hope that you join us in defending our national monuments by making your voices heard here.

A Monumental Road Trip: Vermilion Cliffs National Monument!

Protected in 2000, the monument houses a geologic wonderland of erosional formations—sheer cliffs, slot canyons, vibrantly colored yellow-red-orange-purple sandstone dunes, rock outcroppings, and mesas. It’s a remote and seemingly unspoiled area, and home to many sensitive species of plants and animals. The monument is also home to over twenty species of raptors and after being reintroduced in 1996 by the Peregrine Fund, California Condors!

Perhaps the most famous feature of Vermilion Cliffs is “The Wave”. The area is so popular that the BLM hands out permits for just 20 individuals to visit each day. There are 10 permits handed out in an online lottery and 10 permits handed out in-person the day before at the BLM field office in Kanab. We decided to try our luck and showed up bright and early at the put our name in for a permit. The day we showed up, there were 96 other people vying for “Wave” permits. It was a fully international crowd and despite the tension, was quite festive. They literally pick numbers like a lottery or bingo. Somehow our number was picked and we scored a permit to visit “The Wave” the next day! Even if we hadn’t though, we would have had no shortage of jaw-dropping wildness to experience; as the BLM ranger said, “you have already won the lottery just by being there.”

We woke up before sunrise to start our hike, both to beat the heat and to experience the morning colors and rhythms of the desert. When we got to the trail-head, Yoko, a Japanese woman from Tokyo was already there. We invited her to join us and we headed off across the desert in the barely-there morning light.

“The Wave” is incredible. Lines of color etched into rock, swirling and pulsating, creating a rhythm of color and texture. We spent over an hour clambering around on the rock, looking at the phenomenon from every perspective.

With the Wave securely etched in our consciousness, we decided to explore further and hiked to “The Second Wave” and then to the “Swirls.” From the Swirls, we followed a canyon back to the entry point for “The Wave.” The canyon was extremely narrow in spots, and Sam kindly gave rides to Yoko and me through puddles. We headed back to “The Wave” for one final viewing. More people had arrived in the interim and it was their turn to sit in awe of sandscape.

While we were hiking “The Wave” we meet people from Japan, Canada, France, Puerto Rico (that group had been trying for three years to get a permit!), Denmark and New Hampshire, and this doesn’t account for the other 88 people that showed up for the daily permit lottery; most of whom seemed to be from overseas. That’s a jaw-dropping number of international people in a remote section of Utah and Arizona, and they are there because of our amazing, unique and irreplaceable public lands.

Vermilion Cliffs’ fate remains up in the air as pro-mining groups continue to pressure the administration to reduce or remove protections to open up mineral development. This short-term gain for a few would be at the expense of the long-term gain (beauty, wildness, solitude, ecology, history) for us all.

As we travel onto our next national monument, I urge you to please help preserve this incredible national monument.  Visit here to take action!

A Monumental Road Trip: Bears Ears

by mfa-admin | Aug 28, 2017 | Uncategorized

So we decided to take a leap and help defend our national monuments! Over the course of the next few months, we will be visiting threatened national monuments throughout the West.

We want you to come along for the ride. We hope to meet many of the people who worked together to conserve our national heritage along the way. And we hope that you join us in defending our national monuments by making your voices heard here.

A Monumental Road Trip: Bears Ears National Monument!

Whose Ears? Bears Ears! Whose Land? Our Land!

We were finally headed to Utah, the epicenter of the public land privatization movement and home to two of the hot-spots of the Administration’s monument “review.”

Our first stop in Utah was Salt Lake City (SLC) to attend the, “This Land is Our Land,” march during the Outdoor Retailer Show. Like any good Portlander, we will drive hundreds of miles for a good rally. This would be the last Outdoor Retailer held in SLC, as the show is moving to Denver in response to the continued push by Utah elected officials to sell-off public lands and their opposition to the designation of Bears Ears as a national monument.

On our first morning in SLC, we got up bright and early to attend Conservation Alliance’s breakfast. Conservation Alliance is a membership organization comprised of outdoor recreation businesses. The membership dues are passed on to advocacy groups working to protect the places that we rely on for outdoor recreation. Conservation Alliance has been hugely successful in galvanizing the outdoor industry to support public lands advocacy, including working to protect many of the monuments that are now under threat.

Conservation Alliance hosted a great breakfast with a talk by photographer Joe Riis to a packed house. Check out his forthcoming book Migrations written about large migrations into Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park.

Shout out to the Patagonia SLC Outlet store for providing sign-making supplies for the march.

In the afternoon, we marched for public lands! People were there to celebrate the public lands that we all depend on and enjoy. It was fantastic to see the Utah State Capital Building overrun with supporters from a wide-range of backgrounds that all connect with public lands in different ways. There were hunters, cyclists, climbers, tribal members, wilderness lovers, business leaders, politicians, hikers, Democrats, Republicans and more all unified around the support of public lands.

After the march, we packed up and headed to Bears Ears. We were going to meet Southwest Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) for a volunteer weekend. SUWA has been a strong, steady and successful voice for the conservation of public lands (and wilderness areas in particular) in Utah.

The volunteer trip was focused on constructing fence to protect aspen. The La Sal Mountains have beautiful old aspen groves; but unfortunately, new aspen only grow when the old ones are disturbed (historically by fire). Fire suppression and over-management has resulted in a lack of new aspen growth. Aspen that do attempt to come up are quickly eaten by cattle and ungulates. We fenced three areas in the afternoon and then had a great potluck learning about our fellow volunteers, discussing Bears Ears, and hearing more about SUWA’s and the Forest Service’s work.

The next day we did some work on Hammond Canyon trail.

After Hammond trail, we finally drove to the namesake of the monument, the Bears Ears buttes. We quickly learned why they advise not driving after rain: the mud is fiercely slick and our caravan became stuck. We turned around and decided to try again another day.

The next night we camped at Muley Point, an amazing overlook that has sweeping views down into the Goosenecks and out to Monument Valley in Arizona.

Bears Ears is beautiful; without a doubt, but more importantly, it is and feels like sacred land. The designation was an effort spearheaded by five Tribes to protect cultural sites, and after even a short visit, the deep history of the place was obvious. From Lyle Balenquah’s essay, Spirit of Place: Preserving the Cultural Landscape of the Bears Ears, in Jacqueline Keeler’s Edge of Morning, native voices speak for themselves:

The Bears Ears Monument is about more than just preservation for preservation’s sake, more than drawing a line on a map to protect a fragile ecosystem from the development of the fossil fuel industry. It’s also about more than protection of archaeological sites from wanton vandalism or preservation of these sites solely for scientific purposes. It’s about the protection of Indigenous cultures so that we retain our ability to pass on our traditional knowledge to future generations. Protection of this landscape allows us to share with the outside world that we are more than historical footnotes, to show that our connections to ancestral lands traverse distance and time. [. . .]

Bears Ears has become the lightning rod for the public lands debate, and unsurprisingly; after a perfunctory visit, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended that the monument be reduced in size. The designation of Bears Ears represents not just the protection of important lands but is also milestone in tribal/federal relations. A reduction of the monument would not just be an affront to the conservation of public lands, but also to the Tribes who proposed the monument and whose important cultural and spiritual lands were protected through the designation. Stand With Bears Ears!

As we travel onto our next national monument, I urge you to please help preserve this incredible place.  Visit here to take action!

A Monumental Road Trip: Grand Canyon-Parashant

by mfa-admin | Aug 27, 2017 | Uncategorized

So we decided to take a leap and help defend our national monuments! Over the course of the next few months, we will be visiting threatened national monuments throughout the West.

We want you to come along for the ride. We hope to meet many of the people who worked together to conserve our national heritage along the way. And we hope that you join us in defending our national monuments by making your voices heard here.

A Monumental Road Trip: Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument!

This monument in Arizona is vast and magnificently diverse. It includes deep canyons, 30 degrees hotter than the forest, to 8,000’ Mount Trumball with beautiful Ponderosa Pine. It’s also remote and undeveloped. There are no paved roads into the monument and it would be simple to find complete solitude. The remoteness, vastness and huge landscape-level-protection is what makes this monument so, well, monumental.

Our exploration of Grand Canyon-Parashant began in Nevada, where we contemplated a western entrance to explore Pakoon Springs. A couple we meet in Gold Butte told us a feral alligator lived in Pakoon Springs for almost a decade surviving on rabbits. However, it was the roads from Gold Butte and not the giant carnivorous lizard that kept us from exploring the western side of Grand Canyon-Parashant.

We ended up arriving from the north via the Kaibab Paiute reservation. There were plenty of warnings about the roads into the monument in this area as well, but after driving it we say “Pfft, they haven’t been to Gold Butte!” The roads in this section were far better and softer and we breezed forty miles down Antelope Valley Road for an evening visit to peer into the Grand Canyon itself. Toroweap (technically in the National Park), or as Sam likes to call it, “No Leap,” was a remarkably sheer overlook into Grand Canyon itself. Butterflies, shaky legs, and woozy stomach all show up to meet those carefully half-stepping to the ledge to look 3000’ down to the muddy Colorado River.

We camped near Nampaweap, (aka Two Foot Canyon), a mild rock and forested canyon that was the gap between two foothills and a path from the high country to the low Grand Canyon. At night the moonlight sliced perfectly through the canyon.

In the morning, we walked to the petroglyphs. Like Mt. Irish in Basin and Range National Monument, it was a regular art district with petroglyphs all over the place. There was a mountain goat or sheep that was quite striking and on the next rock over a life-sized but small human hand. It was impossible to not feel a connection with the hand.

From the petroglyphs, we headed to the tall peaks of the monument for a view. Most of what we had seen so far was sagebrush rangeland, and Nampaweap was juniper and pine forest, but heading towards Mt. Trumbull and Mt. Logan, we entered a beautiful taller forest of oak, grass, and Ponderosa Yellow Belly pines. We passed a pair of windblown Ponderosas so big that they could have made small canoes. They were perhaps four feet across and must have come down in the same windstorm. We hiked up to a high point and got some great views of the canyons snaking across the landscape. We found two turkey, two bluebird, and one goshawk feather on the way.

Parashant felt like a really unique and special place that I could enjoy visiting for a lifetime. Department of Interior Secretary Zinke announced that this Monument has been excused from attempts at revision. I’m glad to know that Grand Canyon-Parashant will continue to be preserved for others to enjoy for their lifetimes as well.

As we travel onto our next public lands adventure, I urge you to please help preserve all our incredible national monuments.  Visit here to take action!

A Monumental Road Trip: Gold Butte

by mfa-admin | Aug 9, 2017 | Uncategorized

So we decided to take a leap and help defend our national monuments! Over the course of the next few months, we will be visiting threatened national monuments throughout the West.

We want you to come along for the ride. We hope to meet many of the people who worked together to conserve our national heritage along the way. And we hope that you join us in defending our national monuments by making your voices heard here.

A Monumental Road Trip: Gold Butte National Monument!

In far southeastern Nevada, Gold Butte National Monument preserves a remote and rugged desert landscape. Gold Butte isn’t your typical desert though; it has outcroppings of red and pink rock, sculptural red sandstone piles, mountains rising to 8,000 feet, and deep canyons. These features make for a stunning contrast to the desert basin stretching between the Virgin River to Lake Mead.  Scattered throughout the basin and rock formations are amazing reminders of the over 10,000 years of history for the people who have called the area home. There are remnants of indigenous cultures such as agave roasting pits and petroglyphs, and of western settlers, including ghost towns and a small dam. Gold Butte also provides a home to numerous desert species, including the endangered Mojave Desert Tortoise and is an important migratory corridor for mammals. While exploring, we also saw jackrabbits, cottontail rabbits, various lizards and a prairie falcon.

If you head out to Gold Butte, be sure to visit the 21 Goat petroglyph panel and the Falling Man petroglyph. Along the way to Falling Man, you’ll pass an ancient agave roasting pit which is hard to make out after years of people driving over it and removing artifacts.

The red sandstone formation known as the Devil’s Fire, Little Finland or Hobgoblin’s Playground is a sculpture garden in the middle of the desert. The red sandstone has been carved by wind and water to create beautiful and odd rock formations.

The Devil’s Throat is an aptly-named large sinkhole in the middle of the desert.

An almost-full moon illuminated the rocks and surrounding desert through the night.

Gold Butte was designated in 2016 by President Obama, and while its designation enjoys widespread support from Nevadans, the monument has some detractors. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recently made a short visit to the monument, but he cut short the tour and did not meet with the local elected officials, business and tourism leaders, and other community members who support the monument, including the Moapa Band of Paiutes who hold Gold Butte sacred.

Given the focus of Secretary Zinke’s visit, Gold Butte certainly seems under threat. After visiting and seeing the amazing landscape, we stand with Gold Butte!

As we travel onto our next national monument, I urge you to please help preserve this incredible national monument.  Visit here to take action!