JayB
Steelhead
Got captivated by that place in my 20s.I don't disagree with Rob, but my advice is a little more expansive. To people of all ages: do it until you can't. I'm in the middle of planning another off trail backpacking trip into the Grand Staircase Escalante wilderness again this spring. I was so touched by my experience last year, I decided that if I ever wanted to do it again, sooner is better, and more probable, than later. At 74 I can still do this stuff. At 84, who knows? At some point I'll age out of doing these fun things.
And Rob, 700 vertical feet into and out isn't that big a deal, so long as it doesn't include any 150' rappels over the cliffs of insanity.
This is one of my favorite passages that captures some of the magic of that landscape:
"Even after years of intimate contact and search this quality of strangeness in the desert remains undiminished. Transparent and intangible as sunlight, yet always and everywhere present, it lures a man on and on, from the red-walled canyons to the smoke- blue ranges beyond, in a futile but fascinating quest for the great, unimaginable treasure which the desert seems to promise. Once caught by this golden lure you become a prospector for life, condemned, doomed, exalted. One begins to understand why Everett Reuss kept going deeper and deeper into the canyon country, until one day he lost the thread of the labyrinth; why the oldtime prospectors, when they did find the common sort of gold, gambled, drank and whored it away as quickly as possible and returned to the burnt hills and the search. The search for what? They could not have said; neither can I; and would have muttered something about silver, gold, copper -anything as a pretext. And how could they hope to find this treasure which has no name and has never been seen? Hard to say -and yet, when they found it, they could not fail to recognize it. Ask Everett Reuss." ~ Edward Abbey