Scenic Drive Hwy12 (Day 3): Escalante River and Burr Trail Scenic Byway add ons

Sam, making sure nobody trespassed at the RV park in Escalante

Wednesday (March 15^th) we continued our quest to complete Scenic Byway Hwy 12!  We are getting close!  We did another 28 miles on the highway today... at this rate, we should be done by the end of the week!  

It had been recommended to us that we should take Hell’s Backbone (unpaved) road north out of Escalante and it would loop around and join Hwy 12 around Boulder, UT, and then we would take the Scenic Byway back. But, as with other days in this trip, our plans were foiled by deep snow, making the (Hell’s Backbone) road impassible after the first 30 minutes. So we turned around and started on Hwy 12 right at Escalante.  

One of the interesting things about this part of the country is that you have to travel with a suitcase full of clothes for a day trip… we had the air conditioning on this morning for the cats, and we had to layer up to check out the road into Hell’s Backbone, then we stripped down to do the Scenic Byway... it’s good to have OPTIONS.

We are in the Grand Staircase-Escalante Nat'l Monument area

The scenery on Hwy 12 between Escalante and Boulder is really something to behold. Our pics do NOT do it justice. Seriously, this must be the most scenic road in the United States.  I don’t think we’ve missed stopping at a roadside turnout to take pics yet!

This rock formation looks like it was "braided"

Some of these mtns are in Arizona, across the Colorado River!

John commented that we go around a corner, and he doesn’t know if we’re going to go up, or if we will be going down.  The canyons just APPEAR out of nowhere around some corners, and truly, you can almost see forever from some of the view points.

Navaho mountain in the background

Umm... trail gone.

The truly amazing thing about this Scenic Byway Hwy 12 is that the scenery COMPLETELY changes about every 5 miles.  It's like you change states - or countries!!










We stopped at the Escalante River trailhead and tried to do a couple of hour hike there, but the river kept getting in the way! (and we didn’t have proper clothing and footwear to ford it). We got around it the first time we dead-ended, but not the second time.  So… for the second time today, we aborted our plans and returned to our Scenic Byway Hwy 12 drive.

Cactus, just budding out; we're a couple weeks early to see the blooms.

Looking down at the Burr Trail Byway from a viewpoint

It was also recommended to us to take the Burr Trail Scenic Byway that runs off of Hwy 12 at Boulder, and we had some spare time in our day today (!) so we detoured onto that.  HOLY COW!!  The scenery here is stupid beautiful; I’m not kidding.  Every roadside turnout and viewpoint was absolutely spectacular.

Looking up at a sandstone grouping of formations

John remarked that there are so many geological events in such a condensed area here that you can look around and see thrusting, faulting, erosional effects from wind and water – all in the same valley! It makes for some pretty amazing views.

I just love all the different colours and shapes and sizes of the formations that we're seeing!

Yellow sandstone in background; red sandstone hoodoos in foreground

Slot canyon entrance in Long Canyon which is Utah red rock (sandstone) in nature

Before we left the Burr Trail byway, we visited our first ever slot canyon... and we JUST missed a group of folks rappelling down the canyon wall; they were just releasing their sand anchor when we got there... which was pretty cool too.  There's no attaching to the canyon walls here as the sandstone is too unstable, so they fill bags with sand and wedge them in the crevasses and repel off that.  Then they release the sand and the bag just falls to the canyon floor.  Pretty neat.

Leaving Long Canyon, looking back down the valley

Another gorgeous vista off the Hwy 12 byway, on our way home