For Peter Lefebvre, a trip into Canyonlands National Park is like opening a Christmas present.
“I call it the great reveal,” said Lefebvre. “How much scouring happened? Are there new rocks showing? … Then it’s like running something for the first time, even if it’s your 100th trip through Cataract Canyon.”
That’s because the lowest end of Cataract — where Canyonlands passes into Glen Canyon National Recreation Area — is constantly evolving as wind and water erosion wipe away massive amounts of sediment stranded by a receding Lake Powell. A 20-year guide who’s run Cataract Canyon nearly 150 times, Lefebvre has watched much of it happen.
Indeed, Lefebvre is one of many southeastern Utah locals with a special relationship to the area’s national parks and monuments. Whether through guiding, recreation, or art, the deeper relationships the parks can foster show, truly, how special they are — as landscapes, as muses, as homes away from home.
Dwelling on landscape
Like Lefebvre, artist Jess Hough has also delighted in watching park landscapes change — but for Hough, that meant keenly observing how light might transform a single vista or formation over the course of an afternoon, a day, or a season.
Hough, who served as the 2023 Community Artist in the Park for the four parks and monuments in southeastern Utah — Arches and Canyonlands national parks and Hovenweep and Natural Bridges national monuments — spent much of the year doing plein air art and demonstrations in the parks.
“I spent so much more time not only going to more locations, but also spending more time with specific landscapes,” said Hough. “When you go out to a place and take a sketchbook or easel and just park for a really long time, watching the shadows move throughout the day … that’s something that’s usually hard to find the time to do.”
Hough, who primarily makes intaglio prints, said she was drawn to the community artist program because it enabled her to invest in that deeper relationship with the parks.
“We’re in Moab and there are so many amazing parks and amazing public lands everywhere right next to us,” she said. “It seemed like a really cool way to spend a lot more time in places that are close.”
A favorite plein air locale, she said, is Druid Arch in Canyonlands National Park. The massive arch lies two miles down a dead-end trail in a backcountry wash bottom, but Hough said it was worth the trek.
“It had such an atmosphere,” she recalled. “It was so, so quiet to a level I hadn’t experienced in awhile and that was very, very cool. Because of the canyon, the light changing throughout the day was very dramatic.”
Pulling back the curtain
While the parks’ landscapes themselves can provide ample inspiration, a broad community puts in work behind the scenes to maintain them. Both Lefebvre and Hough noted their appreciation for the National Park Services’ immense contribution to the visitor experience.
“When you’re going to go visit a park, you don’t necessarily see all the work that goes into keeping it the way that it is, to be nice to visit,” Hough said. “The people, the infrastructure, the park staff, the locals — all of those things have their own worlds and elements going on that are all important for the experience.”
That work ranges from collecting fees and providing interpretive services to emptying trash cans, directing traffic, and cleaning pit toilets. On Cataract Canyon, the work is perhaps even more strenuous — long days cleaning up river camps, interacting with river runners, even facilitating rescues.
“I think they have a pretty hard job because it’s so remote,” Lefebvre said of Canyonlands’ river rangers. “…It’s in a very remote, inhospitable place and it can be a lot. You’re helping people out sometimes on their worst day.”
Seeing the awe
As a community artist, Hough also interacted with plentiful park visitors on-trail and during demonstrations at park visitor centers. While the visitors themselves varied, she said she noted one commonality: the parks’ capacity to inspire.
“Everybody likes the national park. Every age group, every demographic, there are just a lot of people who are all there for different things,” she said. “…People had a lot of different ways that they were experiencing the landscape, but most people were having good days.”
For Lefebvre, that “wow” factor can prove especially potent when people are able to understand the processes that have shaped the parks’ twisting canyons, vertiginous red cliffs, and otherworldly sandstone pinnacles.
“You can tell somebody the name of a tree or the Latin name of this flower and they’re going to forget it in five seconds, but if you can bring home the concept of how the landscape formed, I feel like people look around with a different set of eyes and have a deeper connection to their surroundings,” Lefebvre said. “…That can be a very powerful experience when you see the lightbulb go off.”
Making a difference for the parks
From changing rivers to awe-inspiring arches, canyon bottoms to sandstone pinnacles, the parks and monuments in southeastern Utah have transfixed generations before us — and will be there to inspire the generations to come.
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