Cedar City to Cedar Breaks
Cedar Breaks is twenty-three miles by highway east of Cedar City and four-fifths of a mile nearer the sky. Immediately east of the town the road enters the rugged gorge of Coal Creek, its slopes covered with fine forests of conifers and aspens. The walls assume impressive castellated forms that are especially striking at the mouth of Ashdown Gorge, eight miles distant. Ashdown Gorge is an extremely narrow, tortuous and precipitous rift in the plateau, down which rushes a sparkling stream from the vast furrows of Cedar Breaks. About one mile from the mouth and high up the precipice is a natural bridge with an arch of about sixty feet and a span of about seventy feet.
Following Coal Creek, ever upward, the road presently occupies a shelf upon the shoulder of the Markagunt Plateau whence are revealed glorious and almost illimitable panoramas. The whole sweep of the Terraced Plateau country to the south is visible. Some twenty-five miles directly south, slashed into the green of the Kolob Plateau, are the mazy, white-topped temples and towers of Zion, the grand West Temple dominating the scene. The sinuous profiles of the Pink, White and Vermilion Cliffs are discernible; the hazy arch of the Kaibab; and the misty dome of Navajo Mountain, beyond the Colorado. Several volcanic peaks are in the foreground.
This immense range of visibility is one of the strong attractions of the Terraced Plateau country; one sees again and again, in new and startling aspects, the salient features of hundreds of square miles of territory and its spectacular geological structure.
At Midway the road turns northward for three miles through stately pines, firs and spruces and comes without warning to the abyss named Cedar Breaks.
Cedar Breaks