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Grand Staircase-Escalante
A giant geologic staircase of cliffs in southern Utah
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument covers a huge, remote expanse of southern Utah named for the "Grand Staircase," an immense sequence of cliffs and terraces that steps down in colored bands across more than a billion years of rock, from Bryce Canyon toward the Grand Canyon. Within it lie slot canyons, the Escalante River canyons, the Kaiparowits Plateau, and some of the most rugged and least-traveled country in the lower 48.
Created in 1996, it was the first national monument placed under the Bureau of Land Management rather than the Park Service, and it too was dramatically cut in 2017 and restored in 2021. The monument is a world-class site for paleontology, yielding a steady stream of new dinosaur species from its barren badlands, and it offers backcountry hiking and canyoneering in a landscape of staggering geologic scale.