At the head of the trail leading to Spooky Slot Canyon, a popular destination in southern Utah’s Grand Staircase-​Escalante National Monument, a warning sign posted between two narrowly arranged steel beams announces: “If you have trouble fitting your body between these posts, DO NOT PROCEED THROUGH SPOOKY GULCH. You may become STUCK and need rescue.” The 12-​year-​old on our hike squeezed through the stanchions face-​forward, but the rest of us had to do a side shimmy; later that afternoon, deep inside Spooky, I bruised a shoulder while trying to negotiate its twists and turns.

From the moment, decades ago, when a cousin told me “God was on drugs when he made Utah,” I’ve wanted to go there. I’m a New Yorker of long-standing vintage, but the great national parks of the American West have always attracted me. And while I’ve explored Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and others, Utah still proved elusive. Finally, with a big birthday to celebrate, I booked a family base-camp trip with a hiking tour company.

Think of base-camping as backpacking for beginners: Because you’re hiking in and out of just one camp, you only need to carry the water and snacks you’re bringing along for the day—​not your sleeping bag, mattress pad, tent, and other overnight gear. Still, there was a certain amount of training required in the lead-up to the trip: as many 10,000-step days as we all could manage (I walked the two miles from our East Village apartment to work), along with a good week of pre-hydrating.

While I remain iffy on the divine, once we arrived in Utah I found myself somehow agreeing with my cousin’s youthful impression: The southern part of the state in particular is a magical place, a natural amusement park of mesas, arches, and hoodoos (columns of weathered rock) wrought by millions of years of tectonic uplift and erosion. Five national parks span the state’s southern border—Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, and Arches. Grand Staircase-​Escalante is a roughly two-million-​acre territory wedged between Bryce and Capitol Reef and named for its massive sequence of sedimentary rock layers, with one cliff-​and-​plateau following another.

In addition to its slot canyons—deep, narrow gorges carved by millions of years of eroding water—​the area is known for an abundance of Native American cultural sites and pictographs, dinosaur fossils (our guide showed us a few only after we promised to keep the location secret), the spectacular 126-foot Lower Calf Creek Falls, a petrified forest, and the Box-Death Hollow Wilderness, said to have earned its moniker from the tendency of mules on a long-​ago mail route to fall into its steep canyons. And that’s just what’s under your feet. As one of the darkest spots in the lower 48, Grand Staircase-​Escalante is also a mecca for stargazers, with much of its acreage ranked as Bortle Class 1—​​meaning that on clear nights the Milky Way is bright enough to cast noticeable shadows and even appears to have three dimensions. (In July and August, you can watch the Perseids dart across the sky like fireflies.)

“National parks are the best idea we ever had,” said the late novelist and environmentalist Wallace Stegner. “Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” As a national monument established only in 1996, Grand Staircase-Escalante enjoys fewer protections than its national park neighbors, despite the fact that at least a dozen tribal nations have deep connections to the region. In 2017, President Trump reduced its size by half (a proclamation challenged by the Biden administration, though the matter remains entangled in a web of legal disputes). Earlier this year, Utah Republicans introduced a joint resolution in Congress, which could reopen it to coal mining and gas and oil drilling.

The threat, of course, isn’t just a local or regional one—it’s nationwide, says Autumn Gillard of the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition. “The biggest concern for affiliated tribes, as well as citizens and lovers of public lands, is: If this resolution passes, will this happen to other national monuments across the States? Would it trigger a domino effect?”

While earlier funding cuts have led to staff shortages and maintenance backlogs in national parks across the country, the proposed federal budget for 2027 aims to strip almost $1 billion more, jeopardizing safety inside the parks and threatening local economies outside of them. With the busy summer season upon us, Gillard’s best advice is to reach out to state representatives, as many people on both sides of the political divide did recently, to stop a proposed border wall crossing Texas’s Big Bend National Park.

Before I left Utah, I signed a national monuments petition organized by the Grand Canyon Trust. I’ll also be voting with my pocketbook—​when I head back later this summer to see the Perseids, I’ll be sleeping on a five-​star mattress in one of Clear Sky Resorts’ climate-​controlled panoramic ​glass sky domes near Bryce Canyon, where each stay includes a donation to a nonprofit organization protecting Grand Staircase-Escalante.

Mary Hunter Austin, an early feminist and one of the first nature writers of the American Southwest, once wrote that “none other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections.” I’m already counting the days until I can trade the concrete canyons of New York for the sandstone canyons of Utah again.