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.
This immense range of visibility is one of the strong attractions of the
Terraced Plateau country; one sees again and again, in new and startling
aspects, the salient features of hundreds of square miles of territory
and its spectacular geological structure.
At Midway the road turns northward for three miles through stately
pines, firs and spruces and comes without warning to the abyss named
Cedar Breaks.
[Illustration: _Cedar Breaks_]