Photo of the Day 127

Twilight Over Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah, 1997

Photograph by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel

Crimson twilight gives a Martian air to Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. With just one maintained trail in an area the size of Delaware, this monument is decidedly big and wild. Wrote one observer: "Almost everywhere, the benchlands lay sliced with canyons—deep wounds that millions of years of flowing water have carved into a quarter billion years' worth of multicolored sandstone deposits."

(Text from and photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Celebrating Canyon Country," July 1999, National Geographic magazine)