2012/06 Western USA trip - Cedar Breaks |
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Saturday June 9th
This was our last chance to turn south and visit the Grand Canyon, but none of us was keen to do this. We’d all been there before and, although the canyon is an awe-inspiring sight, there isn’t much to do once you’ve goggled at the view; the hike down to the river and back is a bit too demanding. Also the south rim is very crowded as it’s on every tour bus circuit; the north is better but it still involves standing on the edge and looking down, not Sandie’s favourite.
The next big attraction up the road is Bryce Canyon, but I didn’t want to arrive there on a Saturday evening and try to find a campsite, so we’d planned a one-day trip to Cedar Breaks national monument, a closer but less popular park. On our earlier trips to Utah we’d always been short on time and passed it by, so this was our chance. First though we had to get out of Zion Canyon. The only direct route is through a long tunnel built in the 1930s, which is not wide enough for two campers to pass each other. The drivers of large vehicles have to buy a permit and follow a procedure for getting the rangers to stop traffic from the other direction. In reality there are enough large vehicles for the rangers to simply run an alternating one-way system all day. And collect all those permit fees of course.
There are some scenic spots on the other side of the tunnel, Checkerboard Mesa for example, but there’s absolutely nowhere to park, so we had to watch them go by. We drove through little towns like Mount Carmel and Glendale; their major business seemed to be selling rocks but Sandie was very good and there were no stops at rock shops.
We turned off at Long Valley Junction and were met by an array of signs saying that the road was closed. As it was the only way into Cedar Breaks this was a bit of a blow, but as we sat there, we saw traffic coming in from the other direction and decided to ignore the signs. (I later found out that the road was blocked by a landslide at the other end but we’d turned off before there anyway.) The road took us through some very pleasant country, with lakes, open meadows, and stands of aspen, all very different from nearby Zion.
The turn off to Cedar Breaks was a steep and somewhat lonely road. We reached a very low key parking lot and ranger station and got directions to the campground. This looked to be brand new, and we found that it had just been opened after a reconstruction last year. There were even a couple of showers, but they were locked and protected by a numeric combination lock for some reason. Breaking the combination took all of thirty seconds so now we had showers!
None of the scenery was anything special until we passed the visitor centre and then there it was: a great expanse of soft pink and orange and red spires and arches and cliffs stretching out below us. The centre has a very ordinary front door but a rear wall of glass so it’s a surprise and a dramatic sight from inside too. The red colour comes from iron in the rocks and the pink from manganese. The “breaks” in the park’s name is the local term for badlands. The “cedar” is a common misnomer in Utah as cedars don’t grow there; they really mean “juniper”, the most common evergreen in the area.
After we’d goggled at the view for a while we set off to drive the park’s road, which wasn’t very long. At the far end is Brian Head Peak a thousand foot pimple
just outside the park. We drove up the track to the top and got out to look at the view and were blasted by the wind that had come up while 
we were driving. We were at over 11000 feet, so the wind was cold too. There was a forest service shelter up there and some old stone ruins but we didn’t stay long, just a brief excursion on our way down to interview some shy marmots.
Back down on the park road we stopped at a few overlooks of more of the “breaks” but it was really too windy to enjoy them. Finally we found the trail to the Alpine Lake, and John and I hiked down to what was more of a pretty pond. It was surrounded by flowers and blissfully out of the wind. On the climb back up we knew we were in thin air.
We’d been looking forward to sitting around the fire that evening but the wind stayed up and the temperature went down. Cedar Breaks drops below freezing on 250 nights a year! It was certainly cold; at over ten thousand feet it might have been our highest ever vehicle campsite.