Home»Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument Photo Workshop

In October 2013 I traveled to southern UT to attend a 5 day photo workshop hosted by photographer Jim Kay and his wife Susie. Jim and Susie hold several workshops a year specializing in photography in southern UT, Glacier and Banff National Parks. There were 5 participants in the workshop. Their was a couple from Edmonton Alberta, a photographer from NY. The other photographers were from the Salt Lake area. Jim and Susie know the best areas in the Staircase to photograph. Everyone in the workshop got great images. The Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument is a huge parcel of public land engulfing much of the southwestern Utah desert. The national monument is a 1.9 million acres of mostly primitive land strewn with streams, monoliths and slot canyons. In the 1870s, geologist Clarence Dutton described the Grand Staircase as a "huge stairway ascending out of the bottom of the Grand Canyon northward with the cliff edge of each layer forming giant steps." The steps rise 5500' from the floor of the Grand Canyon to the edge of the jagged Paunsaugunt Plateau at Bryce Canyon. In addition to hiking and photographing the Grand Staircase area, I stopped at the Goblin Valley State Park, the park where a couple UT scout leaders toppled one of the stone goblins, which had been in place for approximately 200 million years. There is a great video on the internet showing one of the Boy Scout leaders pushing the goblin over. On the way home I stopped to photo the Natural Bridges National Monument, Capitol Reef National Park, Monument Valley in northern AZ and Mesa Verde National Park and the Great Sand Dune Desert in CO. There are images from all the areas I visited.