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Tag: snake gulch

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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Snake Gulch: Rock Art of the Kanab Plateau

Arizona Strip & Southern Utah Wanderings | Day 7
Friday, October 7, 2011

After a cold night of camping near the trailhead for Snake Gulch we woke up shortly after the sun began to rise. We had some breakfast and then set off into the canyon. Our hike turned out to be a long one at about 14.5 miles round trip, but it was mostly level without much elevation gain so it was pretty easy. Despite the cold night, the sun warmed things up nicely during the day for some very pleasant hiking weather. We ended up spending all day in the canyon between hiking, searching for rock art and taking a lot of photos! It was amazing just how many pictographs were in this canyon, and I’m sure we could have found many more if we had more time. Most of the pictographs in this canyon are attributed to the Basketmaker people from about 300 BC to 800 AD.

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