Cedar City to Zion National Park
The highway southward from Cedar City (the Zion Park Highway) is on the floor of an arm of prehistoric Lake Bonneville. This is the Great Basin region, a sort of prison for running water because none of its streams ever reach the sea. In the east are the steep scarps of the Markagunt and Kolob Plateaus limited by a tremendous fault plane, the Hurricane Ledge; in the west are the Iron Mountains, veritable masses of iron ore; in the south are the lofty, majestic Pine Valley Mountains, extinct volcanoes whose dark, wrinkled summits exceed 10,000 feet in elevation.
Hamilton’s Fort, a few miles from Cedar City, was once a frontier outpost, the scene of several battles with Indians. Near the village of Kanarra the route passes over the rim of the Great Basin and enters the Colorado River watershed. Here Hurricane Ledge lifts more sharply into prominence, a precipitous rampart of gray and red rock mottled by piñons and junipers. The surface on which the road lies is the same as that on top of the ledge; the land in the valley either dropped hundreds of feet or the plateau was upthrust an equal distance. Hurricane Fault, as geologists call it, is the most striking displacement in the West. It extends from the volcanic Tushar Mountains, north of Cedar City, along the base of the Markagunt Plateau and southward across the Grand Canyon, a total distance of more than 200 miles.
Looking Toward the Narrows, Zion National Park
The road now follows Ash Creek, a tributary of the Virgin, over lava flows where prickly pears, pin-cushion cacti, yucca, torchweed and miner’s candlesticks grow among the sage brush. Thereabouts the first view is had of the Valley of the Virgin, Utah’s “Dixie,” a tumbled region of low mesas, black volcanic cones, lava fields and dunes of cherry-red sand, settled by Mormon colonists in 1858. This “Dixie” section of Utah, about 3,000 feet in elevation, is sub-tropical in climate, grows a large variety of agricultural products including cotton and tobacco, and its poplar-shaded villages have a quaintness suggestive of foreign lands. One of the most picturesque communities is Toquerville, named after an Indian chief, and where the automobiles stop so that the traveler may purchase for small sums an amazing variety of delicious fruit: figs, pomegranates, grapes, melons, almonds, peaches, pears, plums and apricots. Along the village street, with its double row of poplars planted as windbreaks, are odd houses of adobe fenced with stone, seemingly asleep beneath their luxuriant fig trees; irrigation streams gurgle and sing with the cool seduction of flowing water in an arid land. The scene has a pastoral air of Biblical peace and plenty. Three miles south, the Harding Highway crosses La Verkin Creek, turns eastward, and begins to climb.
The Three Patriarchs, Zion National Park
In an instant the scene changes completely. Long, buttressed and fretted mesa promontories parade solemnly into view, an endless array of marching mountains banded with buff, red, pink and gray, mountains that seem to have come from nowhere. Soon arises across the gray-green sage the huge rock cathedral called Smithsonian Butte, spired with silver and gray; and then, instantaneously dominating the entire landscape, there appears, at the gates of Zion, the West Temple of the Virgin. The transcendent beauty of this tremendous tinted temple of stone is best realized when irradiated by the morning or afternoon sun. The southern facade of the structure forms a sundial for the villages near by. The finest description is that of Captain C. E. Dutton, a celebrated geologist who, while in the service of the government, wrote in 1880:
Captain Dutton’s Description of the West Temple and the Gates of Zion
(Somewhat Abridged)
“In an hour’s time, we reached the crest of the isthmus, and in an instant there flashed before us a scene never to be forgotten. In coming time it will, I believe, take rank with a very small number of spectacles each of which will, in its own way, be regarded as the most exquisite of its kind which the world discloses.
The Great White Throne, Zion National Park
“Across the canyon stands the central and commanding object of the picture, the Western Temple, rising 4,000 feet above the river. Its glorious summit was the object we had seen an hour before, and now the matchless beauty and majesty of its vast mass is all before us. Yet it is only the central object of a mighty throng of structures wrought up to the same exalted style and filling up the entire panorama. Right opposite us are the two principal forks of the Virgin, the Parunuweap coming from the east, and the Mukuntuweap, or Little Zion Valley, descending from the north. The Parunuweap is seen emerging through a stupendous gateway and chasm nearly 3,000 feet in depth. The further wall of this canyon swings northward and becomes the eastern wall of Little Zion Valley. As it sweeps down the Parunuweap, it breaks into great pediments covered all over with the richest carving. The effect is much like that which the architect of the Milan Cathedral appears to have designed, though here it is vividly suggested rather than fully realized. The sumptuous, bewildering, mazy effect is all there, but when we attempt to analyze it in detail it eludes us.
Distant View of the West Temple of the Virgin, Zion National Park
“The flank of the wall receding up the Mukuntuweap is for a mile or two similarly decorated, but soon breaks into new forms much more impressive and wonderful. A row of towers half a mile high is quarried out of the palisade and stands well advanced from its face. There is an eloquence to their forms which stirs the imagination with singular power and kindles in the mind of the dullest observer a glowing response.
“Directly in front of us a complex group of white towers, springing from a central pile, mounts upward to the clouds. Out of their midst, and high over all, rises a dome-like mass which dominates the entire landscape. It is almost pure white, with brilliant streaks of carmine descending its vertical walls. At the summit it is truncated and a flat tablet is laid upon the top, showing its edge of deep red. It is impossible to liken this object to any familiar shape, for it resembles none. Yet its shape is far from being indefinite; on the contrary it has definiteness and individuality which extort an exclamation of surprise when first beheld. Call it a dome; not because it has the ordinary shape of such a structure but because it performs the functions of a dome.
“The towers which surround it are of inferior mass and altitude, but each is a study of fine form and architectural effect. They are white above and change to rich red below. Dome and towers are planted upon a substructure no less admirable. A curtain wall 1,400 feet high descends vertically from the eaves of the temples and is succeeded by a steep slope of ever-widening base-courses leading down to the esplanade below. The curtain wall is decorated with a lavish display of vertical mouldings, and the ridges, eaves and mitred angles are fretted with serrated cusps. This ornamentation is repetitive, not symmetrical. But though exact symmetry is wanting, Nature has here brought home to us the truth that symmetry is only one of an infinite range of devices by which beauty can be realized.
And finer forms are in the quarry
Than ever Angelo evoked!
“Nothing can exceed the wondrous beauty of Little Zion Valley, which separates the two temples and their respective groups of towers.”
West Rim Trail, Zion National Park
But the traveler has not yet reached the gates of Zion, although distant views continue to appear and disappear. The Virgin River is now near at hand on the right, a swift, moody, meandering stream whose red waters are the creators of the fertile farms along its banks and sometimes their destroyers. The foreground landscape is red, although the broad, sloping buttresses of the mesas, folded, fluted and flounced ad infinitum, display buffs, yellows, grays, browns and purples.
Sentinel Peak, Zion National Park
Near Virgin City there is a view northeastward of sensational Guardian Angel Pass. Across Great West Canyon, apparently, stands an immense dam of rock cleft by a rectangular aperture as regular as if cut by engineers; surmounting the barrier are two towering white cones, the ghostly guardians of the gap. Another fascinating feature of the panorama is the complex convergence of the battlemented mesa promontories from all directions except the south; these carved and tinted headlands actually seem to advance upon the beholder. In the east are the pinnacled spires of the Eagle Crags, shattered to dagger sharpness.
Rockville, another village beside the Virgin, was founded by Mormon pioneers in 1861, and was long an important telegraph station. There is a petrified forest in the vicinity.
About five miles beyond, the two profound chasms, the Mukuntuweap (Zion) and the Parunuweap, converge; and the two sublime domes, the East and West Temples, with their incredible crests of crimson bleeding down their pale precipices, soar above the rushing waters. Springdale, the last Mormon hamlet, is passed; then the Ranger Station at the southern boundary of Zion National Park.
The Great Bend of the Mukuntuweap, Zion National Park