My First Taste of the Grand Staircase

The weekend of July 24-26 was, well, better than I thought it would be.

We had a 2-day backpacking trip through Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument (GSENM) planned. My friend and I headed to the nearest “city,” called Cedar City, to do a bit of shopping for the trip. On our way there, our other friend called us saying that there was a 60% chance of rain all over Utah for the entire weekend. We’d never come across precipitation chances that high the entire summer and since our trip was planned around hiking through slot canyons, we knew we had to start working on a backup plan.

We were immediately bummed. We couldn’t think of anything to do that didn’t depend on the weather being at least decent. “Well, we might as well stay in Cedar City and just party,” I suggested. There were no objections.

We traveled up and down Cedar City’s main drag, doing anything even remotely fun, which ended up being shopping at the local thrift stores. What bummed us out even more, was that half of the city was closed because of Utah’s state-wide holiday, Pioneer Day. We were disappointed to say the least. How could a weekend go so wrong so quickly?

We ended up grabbing a cheap motel room for the night and roaming around Cedar City on foot, hitting all 3 of their incredibly boring bars. We had fun nonetheless.

On Saturday morning, we headed back to Bryce real early. My friend had gotten a call saying that he needed to report back so that he could work on a fire. Once we got back, my buddy went to work and I passed out again. Later that day, we decided to hit the local rodeo. It was fairly entertaining and made for some fun photos. Afterwards we stayed for the fireworks, which was actually a pretty good show.

Sunday was, surprisingly enough, a beautiful day. We decided to head out early and try our hand at a slot canyon hike in GSENM. It would come to be the best decision we’d made the entire weekend. The weather was perfect and the slot canyon was amazing. Willis Creek was the name of the hike. Slot canyon hikes are incredible experiences and I would suggest them to anyone who enjoys the outdoors.