Utah Adventure Journal

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A Season of Trepidation and Destruction in Utah’s La Sal Mountains By Eric Trenbeath ba×sal (rhymes with basil): forming or belonging to a bottom layer or base.  It happens every hundred years or so. A combination of weather factors over the course of a winter create a prolonged period of dangerous avalanche conditions that challenge […]

After the Interior Secretary’s tour of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments, Proponents say their voice has been anything but heard. In a video long on white guys in cowboy hats, the U.S. Department of the Interior has documented Secretary Ryan Zinke’s early May visit to the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase/Escalante national […]

South of Bears Ears Pass, the tree covered Cedar Mesa stair steps down into the San Juan River canyon and the red dirt desert of the Navajo Nation. The pinnacles and buttes of Monument Valley rise up in front of distant Black Mesa, home of the Hopi, and the longest continually inhabited city in the […]

  Mountain bikes are fun, they’re quiet, and they take their riders to amazing places. So why are they banned in wilderness? It’s a question of great concern to Ted Stroll, who, as head of the non-profit Sustainable Trails Coalition (STC), is working to change the Wilderness Act to allow mountain bikes in some of […]

  To say I was sucking wind would be an understatement. At one point, I wasn’t even sure I was skiing. Yes, things that looked like skis were attached to my feet though they were only about an inch and a half wide. And there was certainly snow all around with views of mountain peaks, […]

Whoomph! The sound stopped me in my tracks and raised the hair on my arms and neck. The entire five-acre meadow of snow had collapsed under my skis. Though I was clear of any avalanche run out zones, I instinctively cringed against an onslaught of tumbling snow and made a quick scan of the surrounding […]

From the window of a small plane, the area north of Canyonlands National Park appears as a vast, rolling expanse of white, tan and red sandstone, grayish-green fields of rice grass, sage and blackbrush, punctuated with towering buttes, and incised with deep canyons that fall towards the Green River. An asphalt ribbon, Utah’s Scenic Byway […]

  From deep religious symbolism to mere graffiti, their meaning has been the subject of endless speculation. Images have been reproduced as fine art, on tacky refrigerator magnets, car window stickers and plastic light switch covers in faux-adobe, southwestern condos. Ubiquitously scattered on cliff faces throughout the desert southwest, the chipped and painted figures of […]

We’re standing on top of an island surrounded by a sea of desert. From the summit of South Mountain, (11,862′) we can see out across a vast red desert that extends southward all the way into the Four Corners region where the states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico share a common border. To […]

        Business leaders and advocates for the outdoor recreation and tourism industry are not impressed by the State of Utah’s crusade to wrest control of public lands from the federal government. They say the move is a land grab designed to privatize vast tracts of the public domain and put it into […]