Editor Pick
Cedar Breaks National Monument
- November 20, 2006
- Rated 4 of 5 by
callen60 from Ozarks, Missouri
This place is truly a step back in time, a taste of what a national park visit used to be like. In an ironic twist, Cedar Breaks probably enjoys less prominence now than it did years ago: in the glory days of railroad-promoted park travel, The Utah Parks Company (a Union Pacific subsidiary) offered escorted rail/road trips to Zion, Bryce Canyon, the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, and Cedar Breaks, just 40 miles away from the end of the line at Cedar City. Gilbert Stanley Underwood designed lodges and cabins at each site for the railroad, all in the style now associated with national park architecture: timber structures with a central lodge surrounded by similarly styled cabins. Like all but Bryce, the original lodge at Cedar Breaks is gone; unlike the others, no replacement was built, so camping is your only inside-the-park-option.
We came here from Bryce Canyon, to which Cedar Breaks is often compared. It’s a short drive between the two, taking you off one plateau and up onto the higher, forested Aquarius Plateau. These are mountain roads, often closed well into May, and we saw the evidence just outside Cedar Breaks: snowbanks still protected from the June sun by the shade of a forest glade, waiting for a midsummer’s afternoon snowball fight.
We parked near Point Supreme, near the southern end of the Monument. It’s the first park I’ve been to with a walk-up entrance station. A few hundred more yards brought us to the visitor center, just in front of the main overlook. A small log cabin that dates from the 1930s, it felt and looked a lot like the old visitor centers at Zion and other parks—buildings that were overwhelmed as yearly visitation soared past one million. Stepping around the central bookcases and revealed two picture windows framing the amazing view below. It was a smaller but still effective version of Underwood’s trick at Grand Canyon Lodge—hiding the spectacle from view until you enter the building.
View from the Cedar Breaks Visitor Center
Like Bryce, Cedar Breaks is an amphitheater at a plateau’s edge, where erosion is gradually carving back the edge, exposing the rock layers and shaping them into fantastic colored hoodoos and edges. Not only is Cedar Breaks at higher elevation than Bryce, the amphitheater’s bowl is much steeper, keeping you at the top edge. That means the intimacy of Bryce is missing, where part of the magic is the ease with which you can hike through the fairytale landscape.
Vista at Point Supreme
Hiking options here are correspondingly more limited: there are only two main trails, one along the rim and the other through the forest. The scenic drive runs north along the amphitheater's edge, heading to Brian Head, a ski resort at 13,000’ (and one of the few lodging options in the immediate area).
The colors here are a match for Bryce, absent the hiking, riding, and crowds. Our stop totaled an hour and half, and easily could have been more.
From journal On the Plateau, Part V: Crossing Utah's Backroads and Badlands