The Grand Staircase Headwaters Wilderness

"... the glory of all this rock-work is seen in the Pink Cliffs... The upper tier of the vast amphitheater is one mighty ruined colonnade. Standing obelisks, prostrate columns, shattered capitals, panels, niches, buttresses, repetitions of symmetrical forms, all bring vividly before the mind suggestions of the work of giant hands, a race of genii once rearing temples of rock, but now chained up in a spell of enchantment, while their structures are falling in ruins through centuries of decay. Along the southern and southeastern flank of the Paunsagunt these ruins stretch mile after mile. But the crowning work is Table Cliff in the background. Standing 11,000 feet above sea-level and projected against the deep blue of the western sky, it presents the aspect of a vast Acropolis crowned with a Parthenon. It is hard to dispel the fancy that this is a work of some intelligence and design akin to that of humanity, but far grander."

"Travel the mere 90 miles to the depths of Grand Canyon from the lofty plateaus of Bryce and you are experiencing in compressed space and time the migration of the Ice Age people -- the first Americans -- from the Alaska land bridge to the tropics."

View from the top of the Grand Staircase, Sunset Cliffs Proposed Wilderness

Between the Colorado River at the foot of the Grand Canyon and the rim of the Aquarius Plateau 190 miles to the north, the landscape of northern Arizona and southern Utah rises nearly two vertical miles in a series of great cliffs and terraces. This is the "Grand Staircase," a masterpiece of geologic and biological innovation, a world where time itself hangs suspended in horizontal and vertical planes.

Starting at 1,200 feet at the foot of the Grand Canyon and climbing in breathtaking leaps to 11,000 feet at the summit of the Aquarius Plateau, the Grand Staircase spans six major biological "life zones", from "Lower Sonoran" to "Arctic-Alpine" -- thus encompassing, within a remarkably short distance, a series of climate and habitat zones representing the full gamut of vegetation and ecosystem types from the arctic tundra of northern Canada and Alaska, to the cactus-studded deserts of Sonoran Mexico. The colorful rock formations of the Staircase span some four billion years of earth history; their fossil record is a history of life on Earth.

The Grand Staircase wilderness is one of most rugged, wild, beautiful and cherished landscapes in the American west. Virtually all of it is publicly owned, under the jurisdiction of the National Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), or the National Park Service. But for three paved roads and a sparse network of maintained dirt access roads, virtually all of it is roadless and undeveloped. And thanks to the foresight and vision of Utah residents, the United States Congress and seven U.S. presidents, most of it is now protected within a mosaic of national parks (Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Capitol Reef), national monuments (the recently created Grand-Staircase/Escalante, Vermillion Cliffs, and Grand Canyon-Parashant) and Glen Canyon National Recreation area.

The total area of this interconnected system of protected public wildlands is now over six million acres -- a land area about equal in size to that of Delaware and New Jersey combined. Since the establishment of Grand Canyon National Monument in 1906, five generations of Americans have supported wildly ambitious proposals for protection of these federal lands.

Why?

To stand anywhere within this landscape and look out to the horizon is to know the answer immediately. Its power is overwhelming.

At the foot of the Staircase the Colorado River mutters and growls in the bottom of its mile-deep, 270 mile long canyon: the "Grand Canyon", one of planet Earth's premier natural wonders, drawing nearly 5 million visitors a year. Between the north rim of the Grand Canyon and the Utah-Arizona state line lies the no-man's land of the "Arizona Strip" -- a sweeping landscape of cliff walls, canyons, volcanic cones, sage flats, pinyon and juniper-carpeted plateaus, all rising gently to the densely forested summit of the Kaibab Plateau. Looking north into Utah from the crest of the Kaibab one can see the "Grand Staircase", a series of great cliff walls rising one after another, each named for its color: the Chocolate, Vermillion, White, Gray and Pink cliffs.

Through this heroic landscape the Paria River wanders southeast from the high plateaus of southern Utah to join the Colorado River at the head of the Grand Canyon. Cutting southward through the north-dipping rock formations that form the risers of the Grand Staircase, the Paria and its tributaries have carved a maze of slot canyons into a landscape largely consisting of bare rock. Here, as throughout the canyonlands country, the sculpting of the land by downcutting streams and occasional flash floods has created an exotic bestiary of erosional remnants: sandstone-spined "hogsbacks", massive buttes and mesas, smooth white and red domes, delicate towers and pinnacles; balanced rocks, potholes, waterpockets, caves, alcoves, rincons, arches, natural bridges; the infinitely complex, multicolored, knife-edged ridge and gulley systems known as "breaks" and "badlands"; and finally, strung out along the ramparts of the "Pink Cliffs" -- dense clusters of pinnacles and "hoodoos", or cap-rocked spires, ranging for mile after mile along the cliff walls and spreading out below the cliffs on radiating spurs and ridges; whole valleys and amphitheaters filled with silent stone towers and whispering old-growth monarchs of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir.

Although the Grand Staircase is now an almost continuous, interlocking system of protected public lands, there is still one vulnerable missing link: the unprotected -- and highly threatened -- roadless lands of the Dixie National Forest that encompass the headwaters of the south-flowing Paria and north-flowing Sevier rivers, at the summit of the Paunsagunt plateau.

The Paunsagunt is an idiosyncratic landform: a southward-trending, northward-tilting, peninsula-shaped sky-ramp about 20 miles long and 10 to 12 miles wide. The edges of the plateau are sharply delineated, on three sides, by the thousand-foot high escarpments of the brilliantly colored, pink, orange and cream-colored "Wasatch" or "Claron" formation. The forested back of the plateau slopes steeply from north to south, rising from about 7,700 feet in elevation at its northern end near Highway 12, to terminate suddenly at over 9,000 feet at the brink of its southern and western escarpments. The top of the plateau has been deeply dissected by the uppermost tributary streams of the northward-flowing Sevier River, creating a 1,500 foot-deep network of forest-walled ridges and narrow, stream-watered valleys.

Crowded along the eastern edge of the Paunsagunt, Bryce Canyon National Park is a narrow, zigzagging, rectilinear block of land about 20 miles long and 3 to 5 miles wide, encompassing the "Pink Cliffs" and the pinnacle-choked amphitheater known as Bryce Canyon . It is surrounded on three sides by Dixie National Forest lands, which are in turn surrounded, at lower elevations, by Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands, including those now protected within the 1.7 million acres Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monument to the south and east.

Unfortunately, Dixie Forest lands all across the rugged top of the Paunsagunt Plateau east of Bryce Canyon National Park have been intensively roaded and logged. The intensity of the logging road system here is difficult to comprehend without looking at a timber road map or an aerial photo: recent analysis by the Utah Forest Network has shown the road density here to be 4.7 miles of road per square mile of land. Under the current Dixie National Forest land and resource management plan, two miles of road per square mile of land are deemed as the upper limit of acceptable road density. Below the rim of the Paunsagunt -- wrapping around its southern tip and up its western side -- lies a belt of roadless, undeveloped Dixie Forest lands that encompasses almost all of the southern and western escarpments of the Paunsagunt, including the "Sunset Cliffs" -- a lonely, seldom-visited, west-facing mirror-image of the "Pink Cliffs" within Bryce Canyon National Park.

From the northern end of Bryce Canyon National Park the thousand-foot high escarpment of the Pink Cliffs sweeps north, northeast, east and then south, encircling the headwaters of the Paria and forming an immense natural amphitheater, today encompassed within two adjoining BLM and Forest Service roadless areas, known respectively as "The Blues" and "Table Cliff - Henderson Canyon". The floor of this huge amphitheater, which is mostly on BLM-lands, is a badlands maze of soft, blue-grey ridges and hills known as "The Blues". The Blues are sprinkled with pinyon pine and Utah juniper, and small groves of ponderosa pine. The tower-studded western wall of Table Cliff Plateau rises above the Blues on the east.

At 10,000 feet in elevation, the sky-island known as Table Cliff Plateau is the rooftop balcony of the Grand Staircase Headwaters wilderness. Its southern tip, known as Powell Point, features a spectacular pocket-forest of 3,000 year-old bristlecone pines and offers one of the most commanding panoramic views to be found anywhere on the Colorado Plateau.

It is a sad accident of fate that the boundaries of Bryce Canyon National Park were drawn so as to include only the eastern "breaks" of Bryce Canyon, while excluding the heavily timbered and well-watered summit of the Paunsagunt Plateau, and adjoining Forest Service lands to north and east to Table Cliff Plateau.

The omission is especially troubling in view of recent studies suggest that animal species are steadily vanishing from national parks which are surrounded by unprotected lands that -- like the Paunsagunt -- have been severely fragmented by logging, mining, agricultural and industrial development, and associated road construction. A study by ecologist William D. Newmark, for example (Newmark, 1987, 1995), cited 42 cases of extirpation of mammal species in 14 North American parks. Many of our national parks, Newmark concluded, are actually biological "islands" surrounded by a sea of developed land. Like the land-bridge islands of the Aleutian archipelago, these protected areas are simply too small to support species of wildlife once common to them.

One of the parks Newmark studied was Bryce Canyon National Park. For all its natural beauty, Bryce Canyon has been slowly losing its natural diversity of plant and animal species since the park was established in 1924. At the time of Newmark's study, the red fox had not been seen there for 28 years. The pronghorn antelope, the beaver, and the northern flying squirrel, he found, had all vanished since the park was established.

In lands bordering the park, livestock forage competition and hunting pressure has sharply reduced the populations of certain large mammal species -- and completely eliminated others.

View from the top of the Grand Staircase, Bridge Canyon Proposed Wilderness

"Bears, once common on the Paunsagunt Plateau, seem to have been exterminated," wrote geologist Herbert Gregory in 1951. "No grizzly bear has been reported during the last half century, and only three brown [black] bears are known to have visited the region since 1920. Wolves and coyotes, the bane of the stockman, have been so reduced in numbers as to be no longer a serious menace. Beavers, formerly abundant, have been exterminated by trappers. Of the `great herds' of elk, antelope, and deer that provided food and raiment for the Indians and the Mormon pioneers, only the mule deer remains."

Unfortunately, because the natural predators of mule deer (primarily wolves, cougar and native Americans) have been extirpated or severely reduced in number, mule deer populations on the Paunsagunt have grown far beyond those of pre-settlement times, and overbrowsing by deer, together with severe overstocking of the range with domestic livestock throughout the past 100 years, has drastically reduced plant diversity and wildlife forage, while aggravating problems of soil loss and stream sedimentation. Some Utah ecologists believe that modern mule deer populations may be as much as ten times greater than in presettlement times (Harper, 2004). The extreme overstocking of our public lands with domestic livestock, together with suppression of natural fires, removal of predators, and exploding populations of deer -- have together caused huge losses in plant diversity, especially in those National Forest lands that, like the Paunsagunt, have been intensively roaded and logged. The most dramatic indicator of the consequences of such management practices has been the sharp decrease in aspen rgeneration throughout the high plateau country of southern Utah (Buchanan, 1960).

Is the steady decline of plant and animal diversity, the ongoing roading, logging, fragmentation, and despoliation of our national forest lands -- is this continuing attrition of Utah's natural heritage inevitable and inexorable?

No!

In recent years, better management practices have begun to curb overgrazing and over-hunting, and the Utah Department of Wildlife Resources has been systematically reintroducing native wildlife species throughout Utah. Elk, once extirpated from most of Utah, were reintroduced on the Sevier Plateau north of Bryce Canyon National Park in the 1930's: gradually they are expanding their range into the headwaters of the Grand Staircase wilderness to the south. Prairie dogs, a "threatened" species, have been successfully reintroduced in the north end of Bryce Canyon National Park. The endangered peregrine falcon has returned to the windswept ramparts of the Pink Cliffs. Pronghorn have been successfully reintroduced on Parker Mountain to the northwest and in the southeastern portion of the Grand Staircase National Monument.

Whether they are reintroduced or not, wolves will eventually roam into Utah from points north and west. Some day the natural balance between large carnivores and mule deer populations may be restored, along with viable populations of Rocky Mountain Elk, Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep, pronghorn, and other wide-ranging species of large game.

But as the Newmark study suggests, the success of such restoration programs--and ultimately the potential to restore and sustain the full web of life in all of its diversity and complexity--will be directly dependent upon the preservation of unroaded and undisturbed core natural areas of sufficient size to support genetically diverse, viable, sustainable, and balanced populations of interrelated plants and animals.

The Utah Forest Network's wilderness proposal for Utah is grounded in a commitment to the future of life on earth. With almost 90 percent of America's land area now committed to industrial, commercial, agricultural, residential, or military uses, we believe that all remaining roadless areas that qualify for designation as wilderness should be protected forever in their natural state.

In keeping with that philosophy, our wilderness proposal would protect all Forest Service roadless areas at the headwaters of the Grand Staircase Wilderness -- a total of about 144,000 acres of land in 9 roadless units.

In addition, we recommend the permanent closure, except as needed for reasonable public access to trailheads, of the network of logging roads across the top of the Paunsagunt Plateau; the establishment of a Paunsagunt Plateau Wildlands Recovery Area there, and the eventual inclusion of an additional 86,000 acres of Forest Service land on the summit of the Paunsagunt, within our proposed Grand Staircase Headwaters Wilderness.

Roadless Areas of the Grand Staircase Headwaters Wilderness

References

Buchanan, Hayle, 1960, The Plant Ecology of Bryce Canyon National Park. Doctoral thesis, University of Utah Department of Botany, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Buchanan, Hayle, 1974, Living Color: Wildflower Communities of Bryce Canyon & Cedar Breaks.

Dutton, Clarence E., 1880, Report on the Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah, with atlas. U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office.

Geary, Edward A., 1992, A Proper Edge of the Sky. University of Utah Press, 1992.

Geerlings, Paul F., 1980, down the Grand Staircase. Salt lake City, Utah, Grand Canyon Publications, Inc.

Harper, Kim. Personal interview. Utah Valley State College, Orem, Utah, October 20, 2004.

Lindquist, Robert C., 1977, The geology of Bryce Canyon National Park. Bryce Canyon Natural History Association, Bryce Canyon, Utah.

Newell, Linda King, and Talbot, Vivian Linford,1998, A History of Garfield County. Utah State historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Newmark, W.D. 1995. Extinction of mammal populations in western North American national parks. Conservation Biology 9:512-526.

Newmark, W.D. 1987. Mammalian extinctions in western North American parks: A landbridge perspective. Nature 325: 430-432.

Roylance, Ward, Utah, A Guide to the State, revised edition, Salt Lake City, Utah Arts Council, 1982

Stegner, Wallace, Mormon Country, 1942. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, New York, NY.

United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Dixie National Forest, 1986, Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Dixie National Forest land and Resource Management Plan, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C

United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1987, General Management Plan for Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah.

United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Intermountain Region, The Dixie National Forest : managing an alpine forest in an arid setting, 1987

Utah Wilderness Coalition, 1987. Wilderness at the Edge

Woolsey, Nethella Griffin, The Escalante Story: A History of the Town of Escalante, and Description of the surrounding Territory, Garfield County, Utah, 1875-1964 (Springville, Utah: Art City Publishing Company, 1964)