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.