Three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is at the heart of some of the most remote terrain in the lower 48. Famous for its red rock canyons, arches and fossil beds, the rugged land is punctuated by sites like Death Ridge, Carcass Canyon and Hell's Backbone Road.
Those names staked on the old maps by the region's first white settlers tell you all you need to know about how harsh, brutal — and beautiful — the land is.
"Them old cowboys back in those days, they were tough," says Shannon Steed, a businessman and armchair local historian.
Steed comes from a long line of Mormon pioneers: the cowboys and loggers who helped tame this country, as locals put it, and scratch out a living from it.
His hometown Escalante, population 800, along the meandering Escalante River is ringed by mesas...