Bedrock and Paradox: The Mysteries and Magic of Southern Utah’s Desert Canyons

Bedrock and Paradox: The Mysteries and Magic of Southern Utah’s Desert Canyons

Backpack through southern Utah’s spectacular sandstone canyons, where ancient rock art, literary legends, and rugged wilderness invite you to explore the mysteries of the desert and the stories it holds.

Finding Meaning in the Desert Wilderness

Southern Utah’s sandstone canyons have inspired artists, writers, and wanderers for generations, but their human history stretches back thousands of years. Through backpacking, literary discussions, creative fieldwork, and encounters with ancient rock art, students explore the many ways people have inhabited, understood, and defended this landscape. The stories of Everett Ruess, Edward Abbey, and the region’s Indigenous peoples raise questions about wilderness, solitude, and what it means to belong to a place.

Backpack

through southern Utah’s sandstone canyons, building wilderness skills in the desert backcountry.

Trace

the stories of Indigenous peoples, artists, and writers through ancient rock art and literature.

Create

field art and writing inspired by the desert’s landscapes, solitude, and mysteries.

Program Description

Set in the labyrinthine sandstone canyons of southern Utah, this interdisciplinary learning expedition investigates the intersection of artistic romanticism, environmentalism, desert solitude, and indigenous history.

In November 1934, twenty-year-old artist and bohemian traveler Everett Ruess walked into the Escalante backcountry and vanished, leaving behind woodblock prints, letters, and his rock-carved signature "Nemo". Decades later, author and iconoclast Edward Abbey explored these same slickrock corridors, channeling Ruess's romantic wanderlust into fiery environmental activism and seminal literary works like Desert Solitaire and the Monkey Wrench Gang. Yet centuries before both men sought inspiration in these canyons, the Ancestral Puebloan and Fremont cultures farmed, constructed masonry dwellings, and left intricate rock art panels across the canyon walls that you can still see today.

Join National Outdoor Book of the Year award-winning writer Sean Prentiss, author of Finding Abbey, and master educators Jason BreMiller and Ian Ramsey for a visceral and profound encounter with this spectacular wilderness area. Students will backpack through the Grand Staircase-Escalante ecosystem while engaging in far-ranging explorations of wilderness travel, literary discussions, environmental studies, creative field arts, and site observation, participants will explore how humans have understood, inhabited, depicted, and defended the American Southwest over the last millennium.