When John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt urged us to shield our iconic landscapes from the forces of greed and destruction, we listened. Muir in Yosemite, lamenting the “hoofed locusts” that devastated the Sierra Nevada when white settlers turned loose their millions of sheep to graze fragile mountain meadows. Roosevelt standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, asking us to “leave it as it is” and end miners’ efforts to privatize the great abyss with speculative claims from river to rim.
It’s time to listen again to a century of prescient conservationists and protect another American icon, Utah’s Escalante River.
Winding south to the Colorado River in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, the Escalante was the last major river in the lower forty-eight to be mapped and named by non-Native explorers. It's a precious permanent stream in arid country, an Edenic landscape of waterfalls and springs in a maze of sinuous sandstone canyons. The river’s remoteness has been the Escalante’s bane and gift — sparing archaeological and paleontological wonders. Far too few know this place...