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.
[Illustration: _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.
[Illustration: _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: