Spend a month here, an hour at a time.
Morning light, midday sun and the sundown hour change the colors and shapes surrounding you in this eroded and haunting wilderness.
Take Highway 89 to Big Water and turn right: the road into these Escalante badlands is not marked but it’s the only one. It runs ENE along the cliffs at a distance of a mile or so.
Occasionally, the dirt road jogs around large boulders that broke away from the cliffs and tumbled out to where you are now.
Go there in the early morning. The rising sun finds shadows among the blue seamed cliff faces and the chinle mounds.
“Monks” is one of those scenes — captured one early morning in the month of May.
As the cliffs turn, facing the sunrise, direct light outlines sharper shapes and brighter colors, even yellow desert flowers– as below, shadows calling to mind the F-117, “Stealthfighters.”
Carbonates in leached clay show a strong green cast in the morning light, below,“Peek.”
Colors in the same clay change in the midday sun, like that in the“Moby Dick” photographed on a July afternoon.
Late afternoon colors emerge in the rocks, even as you see the rocks break through the surface, poised in “Attack.”
Toward sunset the golden hour reveals even more subtle colors in the rocks and clays of the turning point.
These are the lower cliffs of the badlands below the Kaiparowits Plateau.
If you get here from anywhere in time for sunrise, you will need to hangout in 100F heat for about 15 hours — when the colors are least interesting. Or you can go on.
Don’t try to climb the cliffs or you risk landing under a rock slide — and become another ghost of the Escalante.
There are two roads up to the Kaiparowits Plateau. One is mostly narrow switchbacks cut into the sheer face of the 1500-foot Vermilion cliff.
Scary ride, but no one else is there. I have the Escalante to myself.
When I look over the side, ghosts are waiting.
