The Canyon continues some eight miles farther, but its exploration is only for the adventurous few. There is no trail but the winding river which reaches from wall to wall; sudden rainstorms send between the scarred and splintered cliffs a resistless torrent of water. With a competent guide those in search of unusual thrills may ride horseback several miles into the deep sunless cleft where great pendants of rock overhang and shut out the sky; where the churning stream in flood has left intricate cameos and arabesques upon the sandstone; where little waterfalls leap from green ledges; where one may almost touch both sombre walls with outstretched hands; where the stars may be seen by day. Many a time the canyon seems to end with prison-like finality and the sky seems lost forever. It is a travel adventure that may not be had elsewhere and one never forgotten.
Zion from the Rims
Seen from above, the aspect of Zion is wholly different. Instead of a relatively straight and orderly canyon dominantly red in color, it becomes a fantastic maze of white and variegated buttes and cones. Mr. Hal G. Evarts thus described in The Saturday Evening Post his impressions from the West Rim:
“It seemed that we gazed out across some vast oriental city that stretched away for a dozen miles. Scores of gaudy mosques and tinted towers, striped citadels topped by flat-roof gardens rose in countless tiers from this congested, painted metropolis.... And the coloring! Imagine a tremendous city of spires and turrets ..., its buildings catching every dazzling reflection of the sunset.... There were soft apricot and salmon tints, vague pinks and creams; lemon blending into deepest orange, ... with here and there a haunting suggestion of pale mauve. Brilliant red spires stood beside domes of ivory white. In many of these fairy structures the stratifications pitched so abruptly as to lend a spiralling, barber-pole effect....”
And Zion Canyon is but a part of Zion National Park.
The Painted Buttresses of Cedar Breaks
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.