UnCaged Travels: Boulder Mountain and Grand Staircase-Escalante areas

Boulder Mountain - Grand Staircase /Escalante area - August, 2019

Our journey continued as we ventured from Bryce Canyon NP eastward along Utah Scenic Byway 12 to our next camping spot on Boulder Mountain between Boulder, Utah and Torrey, Utah. Utah Scenic Byway 12 afforded many terrain changes and different rock formations along the way including driving over a section of road that was called ‘The Hogback’. Fairly named because the road is along a thin razorback ridge of slick rock and drops off steeply on both sides of the road. It was slow going but the scenic beauty of the canyons, creeks and formations were incredible.

Aerial of Hogback - compliments of the internet

As Scenic Byway 12 meanders up the southeast side of Boulder Mountain the temperatures became cooler and once again we found our camping spot at about 8,700 feet in elevation with the low 80s during the day and 50+/- night time temps. Boulder Mountain encumbers 50,000 acres which covers half of the Aquarius Plateau (an uplift along the Colorado Plateau) making it the highest forested plateau in North America at roughly 11,000 feet.

Boulder Mountain Camp spot

Nosey neighbors visited everyday

A trip to the Wildcat ranger station loaded us up with off-road maps, new places to see and a homemade lemon and cranberry muffin for the road thanks to the ranger hosts. Yum! Some of the exploring took us over some of the roughest 4-wheeling roads we experienced so far this trip but the reward was plentiful with mountain lakes, aspen trees and breathtaking vistas of the Capitol Reef NP area.

Good four wheeling up to 11,000 ft elevation Fish Creek Lake

Great mountain wildflower were everywhere

An interesting side trip between Boulder and Escalante found us on Forest dirt road 153 called the ‘Hells Backbone’. So named because in some areas the road follows a narrow ridgeline that barely separates the sheer drop offs on either side. The road was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930's and was built to connect the towns of Boulder and Escalante, Utah. Even though the bridge was been rebuilt we could see the timbers from the original bridge underneath the newer bridge. The single lane bridge lies about halfway along the road. From the bridge we looked into Box-Death Hollow Wilderness. The whole road meanders from high desert to high country maxing out at 9,200 feet.

The Hell's Backbone One Lane Bridge

Not far from our camp were the well known Lower Calf Creek Falls. The falls are fed by water from Boulder Mountain but are officially located in the 'slick rock' area of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and are considered a desert oasis boasting a stunning 126 foot waterfall. We decided to tackle this 6 mile route trip hike even though the temperatures in this area were in the high 90’s. Crazy right? We followed a stream the majority of the way which gave us some refreshing resting time during our hike. Along the trail we spotted pictographs and granaries left from the Anasazi natives which just added to the specialty of this hike. The climax, of course, was the waterfall where we stayed for an hour or so to eat our lunch and enjoy the coolness of the falls.

Pictographs on the canyon walls

Anasazi grain storage from over 800 years ago

Lower Calf Creek Falls

Our lunch spot at Lower Calf Creek Falls

Also in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument area a dirt road outside of Cannonville took us to Grosvenor arch which is an unique double arch plus a window in the same sandstone formation.

Double arch

Window on the left side of the arch support rock

One of the notable road adventures in this area was along Burr Trail Road which started as an 1880’s cattle drive route and travels through the edge of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The paved portion of the road starts at Boulder, Utah and winds through Long Canyon, a narrow red and white Navajo sandstone canyon with 500 foot cliffs on both sides and was only a few hundred feet wide most of the time. To us, this stretch of the road was the most beautiful.

Long Canyon

After about 20 miles of paved road we took a detour of 25 miles of dirt road called the Wolverine Loop to explore the Escalante Canyons area. This detour took us to the Wolverine Petrified Forest (Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument) where we discovered trees mostly conifers that had been petrified because they were buried by sand and volcanic ash in stream bottoms and then overtime, silica from the ash penetrated inside and petrified the logs into stone. Most of the chunks that we found were beautified by iron minerals making them display various colors and agate gem like qualities. It was neat to see logs of trees that were 225 million years old and still see the tree bark on them just as it would be laying in a present day forest.

We continued back to the Burr Trail Road as it turns to dirt at the Capitol Reef National Park boundary and we ended up just outside the main area of the Capitol Reef National Park but decided to tour the park another day as it was getting late in the day. Below is just a sample of different landscapes on our trip through the back roads of Capitol Reef NP.