Jaap van 't Veen's photos with the keyword: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

Paria Rimrocks are part of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. It is a quite unknown area of fantastic rock formations just north of US 89, nearby the crossing of the Paria River. The Paria Rimrocks are easy accessible through a short trail. The area has an scenery based on bands of rock in many different colours; yellow, purple and red are the most prominent. In the rimrocks the layers are mostly white and red-brown. The differing hardness of the strata have created a great expanse of cliffs, plateaus, canyons, washes and badlands. The more unusual feature of the rimrocks is the many balanced boulders, known variously as hoodoos, goblins, toadstools or mushrooms, where flat blocks of hard sandstone are perched atop narrow columns of softer rock.

Devil’s Garden - or officially Devil’s Garden Outstanding Natural Area - is a rather small part of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. It is a real hidden gem, only accessible via a quite bad gravel road and not very well signposted. This has the advantage that there are not so many tourists like in the more well known parks in Utah (during our visit we were just the two of us). Devil’s Garden consists of a collection of irregularly shaped sandstone rock sculptures, which are the result of wind and water erosion over the centuries. There are three different sandstone layers and one can see very well that the erosive forces on each layer have had a different effect. The bottom layer forms a kind of pedestal, on which are short hoodoos that consist of a narrow dark layer with a wider hood above it that is much lighter colored. Besides the hoodoos you can see many other small rock formations and some arches.