Ventures in Vermilion Cliffs

Leader: Don Keller and Ann Walka
Dates: Contact MNA Ventures for details
Cost: $1060 Members / $1120 Nonmembers
Difficulty: Moderate

Cost includes transportation, all meals, and group gear.

Sharlot Hall, an early Arizona poet and historian, camping by the Vermilion Cliffs in 1911, wrote, “They are so wonderful that I can hardly take my eyes off them, probably 2000 feet high and carved by wind and storm into peaks and facades…They are the brightest and deepest red of anything in the way of earth that I have ever seen and a purple mist fills all the little clefts and canyons.” Like a long line of travelers—Ancestral Puebloans, Paiute and Navajos, Spanish explorers and Mormon honeymooners, ranchers and fugitives and tourists—Hall was following a natural route from the Colorado River ford at Lees Ferry to Utah’s high plateaus. Traversed, but scarcely settled, this country is still splendidly isolated, sufficiently empty for archaeological discovery, and the home of the reintroduction of endangered condors. Base camping at the historic Kane Ranch—at the gracious invitation of the Grand Canyon Trust—and high on the Paria Plateau, we will hike above, below, and (almost) straight up this vertical wilderness. Our explorations will take us into spectacular slickrock terrain, a prehistoric trail up the escarpment, and the Saddle Mountain Wilderness, where we will have views south toward Grand Canyon, east into the depths of Marble Canyon, and back north toward the Vermilion riser in the succession of plateaus known as the Grand Staircase.

Pre-Trip Information Packet (PDF Downloads)

» Medical/Waiver [33 KB]

Don Keller and Dave Wilson Don Keller strives to help participants understand the landscapes, the resources they contain, and how these resources have been used over time to create human settlement... Read more…

A writer, naturalist, and stubborn generalist, Ann Weiler Walka is intrigued by a landscape’s weave of geologic processes, natural histories, ecological relationships— the patterns and surprises that make up the world. Read more…

“My annual trips with MNA are one of the highlights of the last 6 years; they are interesting and expose me to places I would never experience without the trips.” —R.P.

“I’ve already chosen two more trips to attend in the fall and have handed out copies of your Ventures schedule to three friends…your trips are much more intellectually stimulating because the leaders have a lot of information about the area to impart.”—M.R.