Trevor Huxham

Wild open spaces have been important to me ever since I was a little kid. During recess or Field Day in middle school, my classmates and I would often hang out in the creek behind the school building on former farmland in the exurbs north of Dallas . We built little shelters out of dried brush plants, blazed trails, and even explored the riparian ecosystem on a greenbelt north of the property. All this unstructured time was a formative experience for me because it gave me freedom to play, imagine, and breathe. Experiences like this are why I keep going back to the wilderness as an adult and why I did a day-hike in the fantastic landscapes northwest of Lake Powell over last Veterans Day weekend. The Wahweap Hoodoos Five reasons why wilderness is important It’s undeveloped and untouched by industry.  In contrast to National Parks, state parks, or even city parks, federal wilderness areas by their very nature lack developed facilities and remain off-limits to extractive ...

An impromptu weekend roadtrip last fall took me from Phoenix north to the Arizona-Utah border, where I split my time between Kanab, Utah, and Page, Arizona. U.S. Highway 89 runs between Kanab and Page—two of the most isolated towns in the country—passing through some of the most desolate, stunning scenery on the way. U.S. 89 also skirts the southern edge of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a national park that basically acts as a preserve of all the federally-owned land between Bryce Canyon National Park and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. A roadside pull-off led me right inside the park boundaries to the Toadstool Hoodoos, otherworldly formations eroded from the rock by wind, rain, and snow. The hoodoo Because the park spans so much of far-southern Utah, it’s difficult to grasp what exactly it contains. Most folks typically split it up into wedge-shaped thirds. The western section encompasses the Grand Staircase, a vast domain of successive plateaus that a...