At some point I decided to try to give back some to the land that I love exploring, and somewhere got connected to Grand Staircase Escalante Partners and their volunteer program. Since Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is maybe my single favorite area to be in, this seemed like a good fit, and one of their trips in April, 2025, sounded ideal.
Our group met up at the BLM office in Kanab, Utah, to do introductions and explain a bit about what we were going to be doing for the next few days. From there we drove to our base of operations where we’d be camping. Due to space constraints with other “civilian” campers at the White House Campground we ended up camping in a nearby gravel quarry, which actually worked out pretty well overall.
The first day’s morning task was to work on clearing Russian thistle (aka tumbleweed) from the White House Campground, a little ways west of Big Water, Utah. The normally prickly job was made a little bit easier by the rain / snow that made the thorny plants limp and less stabby.
After lunch we headed over to the Wire Pass slot canyon to remediate various forms of modern graffiti (while leaving untouched the 800-year-old graffiti). Unfortunately there was the potential for rain, and while it probably wouldn’t rain, and if it did it probably wouldn’t be in the Wire Pass drainage, the trip leaders weren’t taking any chances, and we didn’t really get into the slot itself, nor to the main cleanup site near the confluence with Buckskin Gulch. We did get to deal with a few areas of graffiti – mostly people carving into the soft sandstone – so we at least had that experience.
On the second work day we went to the Toadstools on 89, a small but very funky and cool area that gets a lot of visitors, and hence a lot of graffiti, trash, and human waste (yeah, we cleaned that up too).
Obviously a primary goal for much of this work – eliminating or reducing the visibility of the graffiti and raking out social trails and footprints, for example – is to repair the damage and remove things that aren’t what we came out here to enjoy – the natural beauty of the landscape (and not “Karl wuz here 2019”). But also important: removing these problems reduces the chance that some other unknowing or uncaring person sees the graffiti and gets the idea to add their own. It’s something of a Sisyphean task, but better than not doing it.
For the final (half-) day of work we picked up a lot of garbage at the parking area off 89 at the south end of Cottonwood Canyon Road. Spent a few hours doing that, then saying our goodbyes before splitting up and heading home.
This was a fairly bougie trip, all things considered. My only “complaints” at the end were “don’t feed us so well!” and “let us work longer!” Kristen and Victor did an amazing job preparing our meals – and everything else associated with running a camp and volunteer workers – and while it was certainly nice and delicious (and I am not actually complaining of course) if they had saved some money on food and used it, heck, for their own salaries, I wouldn’t have noticed or minded. The work days were also fairly short, which I assume may be to cater to a variety of physical abilities of the volunteers.
The other volunteers in the group were great. It was good to work with them and have interesting conversations with folks from a variety of backgrounds. One participant is a geologist, and I leapt at the opportunity to go through my list of “probably dumb questions”, which turned out to be not so dumb overall.
In short, it was an amazing trip. Really great to do some work, even though it was brief and, especially given the scale of the Monument, tiny and seemingly inconsequential. Kristen and Victor were just fantastic – the whole experience was a well-oiled machine, and fun! I can’t wait* to do it again.
*Edit from fall 2025: Unfortunately I will have to wait. Due to politics, economics, and / or staffing changes (Kristen and Victor both moved on to other jobs, sadly for me) volunteer trips for the remainder of 2025 have been canceled, and as of late November none have been scheduled.
