Trevor Huxham

The Wave As I sized up a formidable switchback, my gut told me, “don’t even think about it!” That morning, my hiking buddies and I had trekked across a field of sagebrush, junipers, and yuccas into a small valley, gradually making our way up a gentle canyon wall in search of natural arches as a warm-up before continuing onto The Wave, a dazzling orange-and-white-striped rock formation on the Arizona–Utah border made famous by a Windows 7 wallpaper . After successfully finding the stiletto-shaped High Heel Arch and cetacean Moby Dick Arch, we were inspired to continue hiking further up in search of Dicks Arch, discovered just one month before. Moby Dick Arch Brian and Steve had already made it up, and I was next in line. I felt stuck—how was I supposed to make it up this sandy rock face with hardly anything to grab a hold of? I alternated between freezing in place and attempting to f...

Rainbow Bridge Natural arches are one of those things that make sense to you on an intellectual level. Of course they can stand up without any external support; an arch is one of the most stable forms known to physics. But on a human level, they float in the air almost as if they’re alive, as if either end of the arch is a massive, giant leg. Rainbow Bridge is one such natural arch that makes your whole face light up the first time you see it. In fact, it’s one of the world’s tallest arches (and far more impressive than Arches National Park’s Delicate Arch, made famous by Utah’s state license plate). But tucked away as it is deep in Utah’s backcountry, Rainbow Bridge is one of the most isolated national monuments in the country. Rainbow Bridge peeking out with Navajo Mountain in the background Before the Colorado River was plugged up by Glen Canyon Dam in the 1960s, Rainbow Bridge required a 6-mile hike uphill from the canyon floor—not to mention running the river south ...

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...

Sand dunes Just outside the seasonal tourism hub of Kanab, Utah, stretches one of the rare sand dunes in North America’s Colorado Plateau. The first thing you notice when you step off the creaky, weathered boardwalk onto the sand is how incredibly soft it is. I’ve been on my fair share of beaches, but the sand at Coral Pink Sand Dunes is so much more delicate and light; it welcomed my bare feet onto a vast, otherworldly sea and gently gave way as my feet left smooth depressions in the dunes. Silent trickles of sand spilled down the corrugated flanks of the dunes as I made my way to a lookout point in the center of this Utah state park. Edge of the protection zone Views from the top were cool, offering a comprehensive take on far southern Utah: the undulating fields of sand stretching from the southwest to northeast, the pines and junipers slowly encroaching on the periphery, and several cliff “steps” of the Grand Staircase rearing up in the distance, each a few thousand f...