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Outside in Redrock Country
This is a landscape like no other, and exploring its mysteries is as good as it gets. Here's a sampling:
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Mountain Bike Lockhart Basin:
Adjacent to Canyonlands National Park, this basin -- which is visible from the Needles Overlook and the park's White Rim trail -- offers challenging trail riding along sculpted red sandstone cliffs and delicate orange spires balancing enormous rocks. If you're lucky, you might spot desert bighorn sheep perched on a cliff or a peregrine falcon circling overhead.
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Hike Hatch Point:
This plateau offers dramatic views of Canyonlands National Park, Lockhart Basin and the snowcapped La Sal Mountains. Leave the crowds behind at the scenic overlooks and explore slickrock domes and ledges along canyon rims dotted with sagebrush and pinyon and juniper trees. Just be sure not to step on the fragile cryptobiotic soil. If damaged, this "living crust" of lichens, mosses, algae and bacteria can take decades to recover.
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Climb (or Just Visit) Fisher Towers:
These chocolate-colored sandstone monoliths rise hundreds of feet from the desert floor, offering some of the most challenging, and spectacular, climbing in Utah. When it rains, the sandstone becomes crumbly, making ascents all the more difficult. But you don't have to be an expert climber to enjoy Fisher Towers, which lie about 18 miles east of Moab along the Colorado River. A hiking trail winds around the base of the spires, and the best mountain biking in the world is all around -- including the legendary Kokopelli Trail.
Photograph the Badlands:
Dramatic rainbow hills make the Mussentuchit Badlands region one of the most colorful in Utah. Situated near Capitol Reef National Park, the badlands encompass a maroon- and cream-colored labyrinth of draws, ravines and gullies; erosion guarantees changing views from one year to the next.
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For details on these and other adventures in southern Utah's redrock country, visit the websites in the Local Information section at right. Don't wait long, though; if the energy industry and its friends in the Bush administration have their way, many of the best secrets around Moab, Canyonlands and Capital Reef will be marred by energy development.
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Southern Utah's wild, beautiful redrock country is a prime target of the Bush administration's relentless push for oil and gas development. The administration has approved leases and exploration activities for oil and gas development on Utah lands adjacent to national and state parks as well as lands that Congress is considering designating as wilderness. National treasures such as the Book Cliffs, the San Rafael Desert and the Lockhart Basin/Hatch Point plateau are in real danger of being lost forever to the oil and gas industry. Meanwhile, in an April 2003 back-door deal between then-Utah governor Mike Leavitt and the U.S. Interior Department, 2.6 million acres of federal land were stripped of wilderness protection. (Leavitt has since been made head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by President Bush.) NRDC has partnered with local conservationists in defending Utah's canyon country, including a successful challenge to a seismic exploration project that was to have taken place on the doorstep of Utah's Arches National Park.
To learn more about this special area and how oil and gas development would change it forever, visit the websites in the Local Information section, below.
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Photos, from top: No. 1 © James Kay; No. 2 © Corey Rich; No. 3 © SUWA
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