Nathan Waggoner, owner, Escalante Outfitters
“You start cutting down the sides of the hills and we no longer have access to those beautiful spots, the places where people find solace … That’s basically stealing from the American people.”
DISPATCHES FROM MONUMENTAL AMERICA: A LISTENING TOUR
When Nathan Waggoner looked for a place to start a business, and a family, he chose the town of Escalante, Utah. Because it’s tucked into one of the few places he has ever found in the world that “stirred that wild feeling” inside him, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
He opposes reduction or rescission of the monument because he worries that if mining operations come in, the public will be locked out.
“You start cutting down the sides of the hills and we no longer have access to those beautiful spots, the places where people find solace,” said Waggoner, 39, owner of Escalante Outfitters. “That’s basically stealing from the American people.”
After he studied geology at a succession of universities, and worked across the contiguous West and Alaska, Waggoner fell in love with Escalante country. When he moved to the town of Escalante and took over his outfitting business, it had around a dozen employees. Today it has 26. Plus a store and a cafe housed in a handsome log building surrounded on all sides by rugged mountains and slot canyons.
The monument review, he said, threatens the region’s main economic engine. Particularly as the nearby national parks like Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef fill up and spillovers discover the wonders of the Escalante. “It’s not a national park, it’s not groomed trails and paved roads, it has another element of excitement and adventure,” he said. The true magnificence of the monument is the synergy between its small wonders and its utter immensity.
“That’s the biggest threat that we see, this kind of reducing and destroying that feeling of just vast remoteness,” he said. “Plus the antiquities here are just undeniable, everything from paleo stuff — we have incredible dinosaur finds — to archaeology, to just the canyons themselves. The riparian zone itself is an antiquity in that it was the last undammed, free-flowing tributary of the Colorado.”
Waggoner wants his 3-year-old son to one day discover and experience the same parts of the Escalante, in the same unspoiled condition, that he did. In ways, Waggoner is even envious of the experiences his son, whom he calls “a total paleo-buff,” gets to have growing up in the monument.
“This is that dinosaur you love, this is where we find those things,’ that’s priceless,” Waggoner said. “People have to go to the Smithsonian in Washington, here I can take him directly (to fossil beds in the monument) and that’s an incredible thing.”
