Utah’s Highway 12 offers beautiful scenery

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Endowed with natural splendor and recreational potential, Utah offers visitors unique outdoor experiences. With picture-postcard scenes around every bend, nearly all Utah highways lead to glorious scenery. A handful of roads boast the designation of “Scenic Byway.” One of these, Highway 12, also bears the prestigious title of “All-American Highway,” the highest U.S. road designation.

Utah’s Highway 12 begins on U.S. 89 west of Bryce Canyon National Park and pushes east and north 124 miles to end at the town of Torrey on Highway 24, just outside Capitol Reef National Park. You can follow its length in abut three hours, or you can spend days or even weeks exploring the vast territories it reaches. Highway 12 passes close by three Utah state parks, side roads onto the country’s highest timbered plateau, numerous trailheads for hiking, biking and horseback riding, and rough tracks into one of the country’s largest and most inaccessible tracts, the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument.

Highway 12 plunges through stridently colored Red Canyon as it heads toward the turnoff to Bryce Canyon. The colors of the eroded stone provide a prelude to the glorious scenery in Bryce Canyon. Part of Dixie National Forest, Red Canyon has its own attractions, including hiking and biking trails, a visitor center and an attractively located campground. Access roads off Highway 12 head toward more remote adventures, including canyons with streams and high country with alpine lakes and reservoirs that lure anglers.

A cluster of motels and service-oriented businesses, including historic Ruby’s Inn, mark the turnoff to Bryce Canyon National Park. First-time visitors at Bryce must allow enough time for touring the park service visitor center and the handsome lodge. Take part or all of the 21-mile scenic drive with its numerous splendid viewpoints. Many choose to stay in one of the park’s campgrounds. Hiking, horseback trail rides and ranger programs round out popular activities.

For many people Highway 12 will be as close as they will ever get to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, if they are not the seasoned backpackers, mountain bikers or four-wheel drive trekkers required by most of its access routes. Utah 12 skirts the national monument’s northern border, providing sweeping views of the colorful geological wonderland of cliffs and canyons encompassing 1.9 million acres set aside by Congress a decade ago. Unlike other national monuments administered by the National Park Service, this one operates under the Bureau of Land Management.

In Cannonville, stop by one of the monument’s several visitor centers for information and orientation to this vast resource. Beyond Bryce Canyon, Utah 12 passes close by Tropic and through Cannonville and Henrieville, all Mormon-founded, agriculture-based communities dating from frontier times. Turn south in Cannonville about seven miles to reach Kodachrome Basin State Park, a colorful region of strange formations popular with hikers and campers.

Between Henrieville and Escalante, Highway 12 passes turnouts for viewing a fossil-rich formation known as “The Blues” and an ancient granary built by people of the Fremont Culture. Several native cultures left signs of their occupation in ruins, rock art and remnants of pottery along the route. Escalante Petrified Forest State Park provides opportunities for swimming, fishing, camping and exploring fossil remains of prehistoric forests and dinosaurs.

Beyond the town of Escalante, the scenic byway reveals fabulous canyons, crossing Escalante Canyon and accessing Calf Creek Canyon Recreation Area, the closest developed facility in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Visitors picnic beside the creek, wade in its water and hike sand trail six miles to view a waterfall in a shady grotto. The highway then runs along a narrow ridge between canyons with precipitous drop-offs on each side.

In Boulder stop by the Anasazi State Park Museum for a look at excavated ruins and artifacts from a village 1,000 years ago. Scenic Highway 12 then heads for Torrey over high, forested Boulder Mountain with its many fishing streams and campgrounds. Look for showy summer wildflowers and brilliant autumn foliage.

Margo Bartlett Pesek’s column appears on Sundays.