US-89: Climbing the Grand Staircase
The climb from Lake Powell to Bryce Canyon — up the Grand Staircase, where each step north is younger rock and higher ground, from the slickrock desert to the Pink Cliffs and their hoodoos.
The Route at a Glance
In the 1870s the geologist Clarence Dutton looked at the country north of the Grand Canyon and saw a staircase. The land climbs away from the river in a series of enormous cliff-steps — Dutton named five, oldest and lowest to youngest and highest: the Chocolate, Vermilion, White, Gray, and Pink Cliffs, each a different band of rock, each a different age. This drive ends at the top of it.
It begins on the Navajo Nation, at Antelope Canyon — Tsé bighánílíní, "the place where water runs through rocks," a Diné sacred site entered only with a Navajo guide, where flash floods have carved the Navajo sandstone into a slot barely wide enough to walk through. That same sandstone, farther west, rises into the White Cliffs of Zion; here at Lake Powell it lies bare as slickrock desert.
North of Page, US-89 crosses into Utah and starts to climb. Kanab sits in the red country of the Vermilion Cliffs — iron-stained Jurassic sandstone, the staircase's second step. The town's name is Paiute for "willow"; Hollywood knew it as "Little Hollywood" and shot a hundred Westerns and more against those cliffs, and just north the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary fills a red canyon of its own.
At Mount Carmel Junction the road west climbs into Zion and the White Cliffs — the same Navajo sandstone you stood inside at Antelope Canyon, here over a thousand feet tall. Stay on US-89 and keep gaining elevation, up onto the high plateaus, until the highway meets Scenic Byway 12 and turns east into Red Canyon, where the Claron limestone flares up for the first time, red and raw.
That rock is the top of the staircase. At Bryce Canyon the Claron Formation — sixty-million-year-old limestone, the youngest layer in the whole sequence — stands eroded into the largest crowd of hoodoos on earth: thousands of stone spires filling amphitheaters cut into the rim of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, eight thousand feet up. The Southern Paiute, the Nuwuvi, called them the Legend People — an ancient crowd turned to stone by Coyote as punishment, their painted faces still visible, the story goes, in the colors of the rock. The Mormon rancher the park is named for was less lyrical: Ebenezer Bryce ran cattle below the rim in the 1870s and left history a single line about the place. It was, he said, a hell of a place to lose a cow.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
7 stops along the route, in driving order from Page, Arizona to Bryce Canyon, Utah.
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That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let US-89: Climbing the Grand Staircase do what it does best.
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