I used to think Utah’s backroads were all the same—dust and sagebrush until you hit something famous.
Then I drove Skutumpah Road for the first time, that rattling 46-mile stretch between Cannonville and Highway 89, and realized I’d been wrong about pretty much everything. The road itself is a geological choose-your-own-adventure: you’re threading through the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, crossing creek beds that might be dry or might strand you for three days, depending on whether it rained in Nevada last week. The thing is, Skutumpah—sometimes spelled Skutumpah, sometimes Skuttumpah, nobody really agrees—comes from a Paiute word meaning “rabbit water,” which feels right when you’re bouncing past juniper skeletons at 11 mph wondering if your rental car’s insurance covers “acts of sedimentary rock.” I’ve seen people attempt this drive in Priuses. It goes about as well as you’d expect.
Anyway, turns out the road isn’t the point—it’s the detours.
About 11 miles south of Cannonville, a washboarded side road peels off toward Grosvenor Arch, and here’s the thing: this isn’t your standard Utah arch. It’s a double arch, twin spans of Entrada Sandstone that look like a enormous stone croquet wicket designed by someone who definately failed geometry. Named after Gilbert Grosvenor, the National Geographic Society president who never actually visited it (classic), the arch sits in this weird transitional zone where the Cockscomb—a serrated ridge of tilted rock—starts flexing upward. The formation’s roughly 10 million years old, give or take, carved by freeze-thaw cycles and wind into something that shouldn’t be structurally sound but somehow is. I guess physics gets creative when nobody’s watching. The larger opening spans about 93 feet; the smaller one maybe 30-something. You can walk right up to it, which feels vaguely transgressive, like touching a museum piece.
Kodachrome Basin’s Accidental Naming Disaster and Sediment Pipes That Shouldn’t Exist
Backtrack to Cannonville, hang a left, and you’ll hit Kodachrome Basin State Park within 20 minutes—assuming you don’t stop every 400 yards to photograph the inexplicable.
The park got its name in 1949 when National Geographic photographers couldn’t shut up about the colors: crimson Entrada, white Navajo Sandstone, purple Morrison Formation mudstones all jammed together like a ’70s album cover. Kodak gave permission for the name, then quietly never used it in advertising because “basin” sounded too geological. The real draw here isn’t the palette—it’s the 67 sandstone spires scattered across 2,240 acres, these narrow sediment pipes that punch up through the rock layers like frozen geysers. Geologists argue about how they formed: ancient springs? Earthquake liquefaction? Petrified mud volcanoes? Nobody’s totally sure, which is either thrilling or maddening depending on your tolerance for uncertainty. Some pipes are six feet tall; others hit 170 feet. They erode faster than the surrounding rock, so they’re technically disappearing, just very slowly.
The Escalante Route Nobody Takes Because It’s Technically Five Routes
Wait—maybe I should clarify what “Escalante Drive” even means, because it’s not one thing.
People use the term loosely to describe any route connecting Escalante (the town) to the monument’s interior: Hole-in-the-Rock Road, Burr Trail, Hell’s Backbone, Skutumpah itself, or the paved Scenic Byway 12 that arcs over Boulder Mountain. Each one’s a different gamble. Hole-in-the-Rock is 57 miles of lumpy dirt ending at a historic Mormon trail where pioneers lowered wagons down a cliff with ropes—honestly, the audacity. Burr Trail transitions from pavement to moonscape halfway through. Hell’s Backbone is paved now but still features a one-lane bridge over a 1,500-foot drop, which really tests your feelings about oncoming traffic. I’ve driven three of these; two made me reconsider my life choices.
Why the Cockscomb Looks Like Earth’s Spine Tried to Escape
The Cockscomb monocline runs for roughly 80 miles, a wrinkle in the planet’s crust where rock layers tilt nearly vertical.
It’s part of the East Kaibab Monocline system, formed maybe 50-70 million years ago when the Colorado Plateau started uplifting and the crust bent instead of breaking. The result: strata that should be horizontal are standing on edge, sliced open like a textbook diagram. You can see 200 million years of geology in cross-section—Wingate, Kayenta, Navajo, Carmel formations all stacked and tilted. Driving past it on Skutumpah feels like watching a time-lapse of tectonics, except it’s static and you’re the one moving. Erosion’s chewing through the softer layers faster, so the ridge gets sharper every century. In 10,000 years it might not exist. In 10,000 years neither will we, so maybe it’s fine.
The Dirt Road Gamble and Flash Flood Calculus You Can’t Actually Do
Here’s what nobody tells you: Skutumpah Road closes when it rains, not because of flooding exactly, but because the clay turns to grease.
Bentonite clay—decomposed volcanic ash—swells when wet, creating a surface with roughly the friction coefficient of snot. People get stuck for days. The BLM posts warnings, but they’re vague: “impassable when wet.” How wet? Nobody knows. I once saw a guy check the weather radar on his phone for 20 minutes, calculating precipitation probabilities like he was trading futures, then just shrug and drive anyway. He made it. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug. The road also crosses several washes—Johnson Canyon, Bull Valley Gorge—where flash floods can appear 30 minutes after distant rain you never saw. The thing is, this isn’t a bug, it’s the feature: you’re supposed to feel small and temporary out here, supposed to remember that the landscape doesn’t care about your schedule.
