Anasazi and Fremont Indians lived here from about AD 1050 to 1200. Their petroglyphs, artifacts, storage rooms and village sites are scattered in he canyons of the Escalante River and its tributaries.

Southern Paiutes arrived by the 1500s and stayed until white settlers took over. The nomadic Paiute had few possessions and left little behind despite their long stay. Mormon colonists didn't learn about the Escalante region until 1866, when Captain James Andrus led his calvary east from Kanab in pursuit of troublesome Paiute. Reports of the expedition described the upper Escalante, which was named Potato Valley after the wild tubers growing there. Major John Wesley Powell's expedition down the Green and Colorado rivers in 1869 had failed to recognize the mouth of the Escalante River; it seemed too shallow and narrow for a tributary. In 1872, a detachment of Powell's second expedition led by Almon H. Thompson and Frederick S. Dellenbaugh stumbles across the Escalante on an overland journey. After some confusion they realized that an entire new river had been found, and they named it for Spanish explorer and priest Silvestre Valdez de Escalante. The river was the last to be discovered in the contiguous U.S. Mormon ranchers and farmers arrived in the upper valleys of the Escalante in 1876 from Panguitch and other towns to the west, coming not as part of a church-directed mission but simply for new and better lands.

Today, the town of Escalante has grown to a population of 650, and is the largest community for at least 60 miles.

Petrified Wood Areas 140 million years ago, rivers carried trees to the site of the present day Escalante and buried them in sand and gravel. Burial prevented decay and crystals of silicon dioxide gradually replaced the wood cells. Mineral impurities added a rainbow of colors to the trees-turned-to-stone. Weathering has exposed this petrified wood.

Hole-in-the-Rock Road The building of this road by determined Mormons was one of the great epics in the colonization of the West. Church leaders organized the Hole-in-the-Rock Expedition to settle the wild lands around the San Juan River of southeastern Utah. A Mormon presence would aid in ministering to the Indians there and prevent non-Mormons from moving in. In 1878, the Parowan Stake issued the first call for a colonizing mission to the San Juan, even before a site had been selected. Preparations and surveys took place the following year as the 236 men, women and children received their calls. Food, seed, farming and building tools, 200 horses, and more than 1,000 head of cattle would be taken along. Planners discarded lengthy routes through northern Arizona or eastern Utah in favor of a straight shot via Escalante that would cut the distance in half. The expedition set off in the autumn of 1879, convinced that they were part of a divine mission. Yet hints at trouble to come filtered back from the advance group as they discovered the Colorado River crossing to be far more difficult than first believed. Lack of springs along the way added to their worries. From their start at Escalante, road builders progressed rapidly for the first 50 miles, then slowly over the rugged slickrock for the final 6 miles to Hole-in-the-Rock. A 45-foot sheer drop below this narrow notch was followed by 3/4 mile of extremely steep slickrock to the Colorado River. The route looked impossible, but 3 crews of workers armed with picks and blasting powder worked simultaneously to widen the notch and to construct a precarious wagon road down to the river and up cliffs on the other side. The job took 6 weeks. Miraculously, all the people, animals and wagons made it down and were ferried across the Colorado River without a serious accident. Canyons and other obstacles continued to block their way as the weary group pressed on. Only after 6 months of exhausting travel did they stop at the present-day site of Bluff on the San Juan River.