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Vermilion Cliffs: Stepping Onto the Grand Staircase

Kanab: Base Camp to Southern Utah | Rock Art of the Grand Staircase
Sunday – Thursday, May 3-7, 2026

After driving all the way across the Arizona Strip on Friday and spending the remainder of the weekend exploring the Sand Hills on top of the Paria Plateau, I drove back over the northern end of the Kaibab Plateau on Sunday afternoon and made my way down to Kanab at the base of the Vermilion Cliffs to spend the rest of the week attending the 2026 UGIC Conference for work. It’s been quite a while since I last spent much time in the landscape surrounding Kanab and there were quite a few rock art sites and other short hikes that I’ve wanted to check out, so I was planning to visit as many of these sites as I could during the week when I wasn’t busy at the conference. Luckily, I was able to find plenty of time for a few sandy drives and short hikes either before or after the conference each day and was able to find most of the sites that I was looking for this week, plus a couple extras along the way! These are just some photos from my week exploring the the cliffs at the base of the Grand Staircase.

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The Grand Canyon: Pipe Creek to Diamond Creek

Wednesday – Wednesday, April 8-15, 2026 | Low CFS: 8,030 – High CFS: 8,660

Less than a week after returning from a great rafting trip through the Grand Canyon from Lees Ferry to Pipe Creek Beach at the bottom of the Bright Angel Trail last year, I called up and booked the second half of the trip for April of this year so Diane and I could finish what we had started. Although Arizona River Runners wasn’t running their usual Hiker’s Special trip this spring, their sister company Grand Canyon Whitewater was offering the same trip, so we booked with them since it’s the same company- just with a different name on the sides of the rafts. On this trip we would be hiking down the Bright Angel Trail and then following the current of the Colorado River all the way down to Diamond Creek over the course of seven days, and we were looking forward to seeing this part of the canyon! However, as I have mentioned in the previous two Trip Reports, I had been battling a pretty bad cold for the past week and a half and was finally getting over it right as we left to drive to Arizona on Wednesday, so I was a little concerned about the hike down into the canyon since I hadn’t been able to do much hiking for the past couple of weeks, but I figured it would be OK since the hiking was all downhill…

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Grand Canyon Polychrome: Exploring The Esplanade II

Veterans Day Weekend | Wednesday – Saturday, November 10-13, 2021

I can hardly believe that it’s been over three years since I last set foot on the Esplanade in 2018! Back in 2019 Diane and I took the year off from visiting the North Rim so we could finally go see the Waterfalls of Havasu Canyon on the other side of the Grand Canyon, and then in 2020 we cancelled our planned trip due to the weather forecast and other things we needed to get done at home. I’ve been looking forward to getting back and was happy to finally return this extended Veterans Day weekend with Jerry. It felt great to be back on the Esplanade! The sky was clear and the high temperatures were in the 70’s while the lows at night were very comfortable in the 40’s. We even found some water in a couple shallow potholes. As usual, I’m not going to get into all the specific details of this trip, but I will share plenty of photos below. We found everything we were looking for and had a pretty great time, until we started climbing out of the canyon on Friday…

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Tag: kanab creek canyon

Vermilion Cliffs: Stepping Onto the Grand Staircase

The Grand Canyon: Pipe Creek to Diamond Creek

Grand Canyon Polychrome: Exploring The Esplanade II