Above the White Cliffs, the younger shaley Gray Cliffs present a softer profile. Deposited when an ocean covered the land, they contain evidence of marine life: sea shells, sharks teeth, beds of coal from compressed swamp and marsh plants. At the top of the Grand Staircase, the limey siltstone Pink Cliffs wer deposited by an ancient freshwater lake and now lie mostly in Bryce Canyon National Park.
Into this staircase of cliffs and terraces, the Paria River and its tributaries have carved a landscape of isolated mesas, valleys, buttes, and narrow canyons, where the eagles eyes detects the glint of water.
Wind 
Pushed by a southwesterly wind, the eagle crosses the jagged double edge of the Cockscomb and soars out above the Kaiparowits Plateau, the highest part of the Monument. From the air, the plateau appears to fan out southward from the town of Escalante into an enormous grayish green scalene triangle, ending far to the south at Lake Powell and the Paria Plateau. The 800,000 plus acres of the Kaiparowits form the wildest, most arid, and most remote part of the Monument.
The fossil-rich rocks of the Kaiparowits contain perhaps "the best and most continuous record of Late Cretaceous terrestrial life in the world." The plateau has been described as a "stony, dessicated maze of canyons," with few isolated springs and a handful of creeks. It is a land of broad canyons, sheer cliffs, red hills of oxidized rock created by underground coal fires, and soils poisonous to most plants. But it is also a land of forested, level benches, thousand year old junipers, and a rich variety of mammals and birds, including seventeen species of raptors that ride the ever present winds.
The forty-two mile long Straight Cliffs mark the eastern edge of the plateau, ending at Fiftymile Mountain in the south east. Nowhere else in this remarkable Monument do the words wind, space, solitude, silence, and distance have as much meaning as here.
Water
Reaching the Straight Cliffs, the eagle ascends an invisible column of warm air rising from fiftymile bench, 2,000 feet below. To the north she can see the Aquarius Plateau, dominated by 11,000 foot Boulder Mountain. To the east lies an expanse of pale Navajo Sandstone which the Escalante River and its tributaries, flowing down from the plateau, have carved into a maze of canyons. In this arid territory, it is ironically water that has done the most to shape the landscape.
But this land of rock surprises: deep in the canyons along sun-dappled streams, lush riparian worlds flourish. Cottonwoods, box elder, willows, Gambel's oak, and the introduced tamarisk form almost inpenetrable thickets. Shaded alcoves and undercut rock faces reveal hanging gardens, nourished by dripping seeps. From a ledge high up on the canyon wall floats the haunting diminuendo of a canyon wrens song.
When the eagle notices the green in the canyons she begins to descend. But since she is a bird of open spaces, narrow canyons hold only passing interest for her. She flies on, toward the circle cliffs, and the waterpocket fold, at the eastern boundary of the Monument. Her shadow brushes across the rock, following her.
