Utah Route 12 East of Escalante UT
Boondocked east of Escalante UT, April 14, 2011
There are some good spots to boondock in the Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument along Utah Route 12 between Escalante and Boulder. This spot is on the ridge west of Spencer Flat Road and overlooks Escalante to the west and Escalante Canyons to the east.
Three hundred degree view
At the very top of the ridge above the 8% grade descending east to Spencer Flat Road, turn south into the access road to the communications tower atop the ridge. At the end of the road is a highway maintenance yard with lots of good level parking and an expansive 300 degree view.
Utah Route 12 East of Escalante UT
- Adequate Verizon cell phone 1x service is available here - no broadband.
- Locate on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Nights I've camped here
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.