The spectacular canyon country of the American Southwest is an iconic landscape, popularized by Hollywood’s cinematic shootouts and horse-chases set amidst a colorful landscape of sandstone buttes, mesas and canyons. These landscapes are mostly associated with the southern half of Utah, but the canyon country — which really refers to the Colorado Plateau geologic province — actually includes southern and southeastern Utah, the southwestern corner of Colorado, a good chunk of northwestern New Mexico plus northern Arizona including the Grand Canyon. Our Big Wild canyon country treks are all in southern and southeastern Utah, in areas that, like the Yellowstone backcountry, are much less crowded than the Grand Canyon. Our guided Utah hiking treks in the Escalante Canyons, the Grand Staircase backcountry and in Canyonlands National park are second to none!
What’s so special about this red-rock canyon country bio-region? Aside from the unusual and dramatic landscape, much of the region is still wild! Embedded within it’s unconfined borders are Canyonlands, Arches, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the new and (hopefully temporarily) reduced Bears Ears National Monument plus several more protected parks, monuments and Wildernesses. In addition, there are millions of acres of unprotected public land road-less areas: these de-facto wildernesses are in many cases threatened by development and resource extraction, but they could be designated as Wilderness areas under the Wilderness Act of 1964. Yes, so much of landscape remains wild! In fact, the “Colorado Plateau Wildland Complex” is one of the great wild-land complexes of the American West where wilderness and near-wilderness lands, generally in close proximity to one another, dominate the landscape. Some of the other great wildland complexes of the West are the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the Glacier Park-Bob Marshall (“Northern continental Divide”) Ecosystem in northern Montana, the Salmon-Selway Ecosystem of central Idaho, the North Cascades Complex of northern Washington, California’s Sierra Nevada-Mojave Desert Complex, and the greater Gila/Black Range/Blue Range complex in southwestern New Mexico and eastern Arizona.
Back to southern Utah. Backpacking is Utah canyon country can be a challenge if you don’t know the terrain. Routes that look good on the map can suddenly be blocked by vertical cliff bands, and so you get “rimmed” on the way down or “boxed” on attempted up-canyon routes. Fortunately, our Big Wild Adventures hiking guides know the terrain, so getting blocked by cliffs is rarely a problem. And the red-rock canyon walls, spacious slickrock mesas, lush green riparian habitats, ruins and petroglyphs plus deep black starry skies a long ways from city lights make for an unforgettable wilderness experience. Don’t miss out!
