7:00 PM at the Escalante Interagency Visitor Center Auditorium (EIVCA)

The first White men to enter the valley were a militia group from Cedar City who were looking for Indian trails. They found wild potatoes growing here and gave the area the name "Potato Valley." Almon Harris Thompson, a brother-in-law of John Wesley Powell, was sent into the area twice, once in 1872 when he discovered an unknown river that he named Escalante in honor of the Spanish Priest and Explorer, Father Velez de Escalante. Thompson again came into Escalante Valley in 1875 and met some Mormons from Panguitch who were thinking of making a settlement here. He told them he had already named the river and the valley Escalante and advised them to call their settlement Escalante. The following spring, 1876, pioneers came in and established a settlement.















1:00 PM at the EIVCA

"Wallace Stegner's Utah" will discuss how Utah's most famous writer used Utah's diverse population, culture, history, and geography to write some of the twentieth century's most distinguished fiction, biography, and history. Although Stegner spent his last fifty-six years in Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and California, he always considered Salt Lake City his "home town."




















3:00 PM at the EIVCA

The Changing Navajo is a presentation and discussion on how the Spanish and white settlers influenced the Navajo culture through their considerable interaction and trade. Learn from Lucille Hunt, born and raised on Navajo land, how her ancestors have responded to some of these changes.























7:00 PM at the Escalante High School Auditorium

I've been thinking of following springs and floods off the Colorado Plateau, talking about the erosion and collapse of earth that makes these fantastic pieces of geography we see around us. What happens to all of it? I will take you to the end of the world, the final repository for everything we know. I have been there, I have walked across it, and I can tell exactly what it looks and feels like. In a series of breathtaking adventures I will lead the way from the beginning of this land to its end, from the Colorado Plateau to the delta of the Colorado River in Mexico.
























9:00AM at the EIVCA funded by Envision Escalante

This presentation will explore the life and work of wild life painter Randsom Owens and place him in the context of his times in Southern Utah.








11:00AM at the EIVCA

The Spiral Jetty, built in 1970, has been canonized as the “icon of land art”, the earthwork par excellence, “the quintessential heroic gesture in the landscape”. As an art object, the Spiral Jetty has assumed mythic dimensions and its maker, Robert Smithson, has been transfigured into a hero, due in part to his premature and tragic death only three years after completing this piece of land art. In this presentation, I will trace the expansive interpretive dimensions of the Spiral Jetty, based both on the artist's stimulating writings and my own multiple pilgrimages to this sitespecific earthwork.




1:30 PM at the EIVCA

Utah has some of the most spectacular land in the nation and some of the most heated debates about what to do with it. Most Utahns have experience camping, hiking, fishing, or recreating outdoors; many are involved in careers that require them to engage with land-use issues. Not all may be familiar with the depiction of land in contemporary writing. Hal Crimmel, Weber State University teacher and author, will explore the various ideas about land expressed in these works, and how they can help us better understand our relationship to it.
















3:00 PM at the EIVCA

Bert Loper’s long, difficult life spans the history of Colorado River boating. By the time he died at his oars in a Grand Canyon rapid at eighty, he had covered more rivers, run more boats, and known more rivermen than anyone. Brad Dimock, author of award-winning The Very Hard Way: Bert Loper and the Colorado River, will present his saga.

























Craig Childs is a writer and traveler of deep terrain. He has published several critically acclaimed books and works as a commentator for NPR's Morning Edition. Two of his books, "The Secret Knowledge of Water" and "House of Rain" have been voted among the top of the year by the Los Angeles Times. His stories have appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, Men's Journal, Audubon, Orion, Outside, and others. He lives in western Colorado with his wife and two young sons.


Hal Crimmel is the author of Dinosaur: Four Seasons on the Green and Yampa Rivers, co-editor of Teaching About Place: Learning from the Land and author of many essays on rivers and the outdoors. Hal teaches writing and literature at Weber State University and is a former river guide.


Brad Dimock has been a boatman on the Colorado River for more than three decades and tells the river’s tales as only someone who has stood around a thousand campfires can. His research is meticulous, his breadth of field remarkable. Dimock’s “Sunk Without A Sound” won the National Outdoor Book Award and the Arizona Highways Nonfiction Book Award. His newest awardwinning book “The Very Hard Way” is the definitive work on Bert Loper and the world of river running in which he lived and died.


Lucille Hunt is a recognized and respected traditional Navajo storyteller and culture presenter. She is a full-blood Navajo and was introduced to the English language at the age of six when she started school at the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in New Mexico. She lived in a hogan next to her grandmother Haazbaa’, from whom she learned many of the traditional ways and stories. She is a graduate of Brigham Young University with a Bachelor of Science degree and presently resides in Blanding, Utah. She’s married with 8 children and 20 grandchildren. Lucille Hunt is a recipient of the Utah Humanities Council “Road” Scholar 2005 Merit Award and is currently employed as a public relations officer with an air ambulance company. She is a presenter in the Utah Humanities Council’s program “UHC’s Public Square” , a professional Navajo language translator, a volunteer tour guide for the Utah State Park Edge of the Cedars Museum of Puebloan Culture, a volunteer teacher of traditional Navajo dance at Blanding Elementary School and a member of the Abajo Storyteller’s Guild. She has written and published a story entitled “The Eagle Can Fly” about an eagle that learns about the power of his heritage.


Dr. Paula McNeill is an Associate Professor of Art at the Valdosta State University in Georgia. Her research areas are community based art education and the history of art education. She divides her time between Valdosta and Escalante where she has a family home. For the past summers she has been involved in the Escalante Oral History project, her study involving teaching middle school students how to document the artists in their community using videotaped and oral history techniques and historical research.


Associate professor of Art History at Weber State University, UT


Jerry C. Roundy was born in Escalante, Utah as the eighth child and fifth son of Wallace Napoleon and Ella May Griffin Roundy. He entered Brigham Young University in 1957 and received both a Bachelors and Masters Degree in Political Science and History. He later received a PhD in Western American History from BYU. Dr. Roundy taught for 33 years in the LDS Church Education System. Upon retirement from Ricks College in 1993, he and his wife returned to their home town of Escalante where they are both active in church and community affairs. In 2000 he published a book "Advised Them To Call The Place Escalante", which is a history of the early explorations of Escalante, the settlement, and events from past to the present.


Robert C. Steensma is a native of South Dakota who earned his B.A. at Augustana College (South Dakota), his M.A. at the University of South Dakota, and his Ph.D. at the University of Kentucky. He has taught at Augustana, South Dakota, Utah State University, and the University of Utah, where he is professor emeritus of English. He has been a Fulbright lecturer in Finland and is a retired Navy captain. He has published several hundred articles and five books, the most recent of which is Wallace Stegner's Salt Lake City, published in November by the University of Utah Press. He and his wife Sharon, whom he met and married at Utah State, have five children and thirteen grandchildren.