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The Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument encompasses 1.9 million acres in the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau of south central Utah.� The primary land cover classes are pinyon/juniper woodlands and big sagebrush and blackbrush/Mormon tea shrublands.� Annual precipitation ranges from 6� to 11.3� and elevation from 4,000� to 9,000�. Authorized uses within the Monument include oil, gas and coal leases, mining claims, livestock grazing, rights-of-way, hunting, hiking, recreational and scientific activities. Microbiotic soil crusts are a common resource in the Monument and have garnered recent attention. Their occurrence in arid and semi-arid regions has long been documented and their role(s) in those regions have been the subject of numerous investigations over the past half century yielding mixed or inconclusive results for ecological services. We initiated a study in 2014 to investigate status of microbiotic soil crusts on the Monument employing a grid sampling methodology (161 sites in 124 grids covering the entire Monument).� Data on the status of crusts associated vascular vegetation were collected. Average vascular plant cover was 9% (range�<�1% �39%). �Average microbiotic soil crust cover averaged 27%, with a few sites with less than 1% and more than half with over 20% cover. Crust cover was similar over major soil and vegetation types. Three-fourths of the sites showed signs of grazing with average crust cover higher on grazed sites than on ungrazed sites.� Soil disturbance from livestock was less than 1% on over 80% of the sample sites. Higher soil crust cover was observed to be associated with lower vascular plant cover. Microbiotic soil crusts were found on about two thirds of the sampled grids and at different development levels, suggesting current Monument land uses are compatible with crust sustainability. Some areas on the Monument do not support a microbiotic soil crust.