The highest part of the Monument is the Kaiparowits Plateau. From the air, the Plateau appears to fan out southward from the town of Escalante into an enormous grayish green scalene triangle, ending far to the south at Lake Powell and the Paria Plateau.
The plateau has been described as a "stony, desiccated maze of canyons," with few isolated springs and a handful of creeks. It is a land of broad canyons, sheer cliffs, red hills of oxidized rock created by underground coal fires, and soils poisonous to most plants. But it is also a land of forested, level benches, thousand-year-old junipers, and a rich variety of mammals and birds, including seventeen species of raptors that ride the ever-present winds. |
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The
800,000-plus acres of the Kaiparowits form the wildest, most arid, and most remote part of
the Monument. The fossil-rich rocks of the Kaiparowits contain perhaps "the best and
most continuous record of Late Cretaceous terrestrial life in the world."