Devils Garden Picnic Area Utah

The Devils Garden is just off the Hole in the Rock road in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument located near Escalante. Easy paths weave in and around the strange shaped hoodoos. At the parking area are restrooms, picnic tables and even BBQ grills. Families can easily walk around the site and see nearly everything in 30 minutes. Be sure to find Metate Arch, Mano Arch, and the whimsical figures known as the Four Wise Men.

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Four miles west, just below the rim of the Straight Cliffs, a small drainage course begins a steep decent. It cuts downward through layers of the Straight Cliffs, Tropic and the Morrison formations, before making a turn southward to expose the Entrada sandstones of "The Devils Garden." Here, erosion creates visual magic. Fanciful hoodoos, stone goblins, and subtle arches are found on a scale in stark contrast to the grand and immense landscapes that dominate Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Devils Garden is a place to contemplate time. One scale is vast and embraces millions of years of earth history. Another scale is more intimate and familiar - a step back towards childhood, when it was easy to turn imagination and creativity loose while playing in the sand.

At the microscopic level, Entrada Sandstone consists of countless quartz grains naturally cemented together by calcium carbonate and iron oxide. The Cannonville Member contains more clay and silt than the Gunsight Butte and Escalante Members and therefore erodes more readily. In the Devil's Garden area, erosion has stripped the Cannonville Member away, exposing the more resistant Gunsight Butte Member. Cracks and fractures in the rock naturally form, allowing agents of erosion to attack the surface. Endless cycles of rain, wind, snow, and ice weather away at the fractures creating deeper fissures. Daily freeze-thaw cycles of winter continue to break the rock at the surface, while summer thunderstorms carry away accumulating debris. Isolated ridges and fins appear as the rock is slowly sculpted. With time, hoodoos begin to take shape as harder rock layers above erode more slowly than softer layers below. At Devil's Garden we see many hoodoos in their prime. Look for evidence of old hoodoos worn away, and imagine others that lay beneath your feet, waiting for weathering processes to create them from eroding Entrada Sandstone.