Days 117 & 118 - Friday & Saturday - Cedar Breaks
Cedar Breaks is a natural amphitheater built of multiple
layers of sedimentary rocks laid down over the past 30 million years or so. It's also the site of an ancient lake - Lake
Claron - which dried up about 15
million years ago. But the geological
description, as shared with us by Ranger Maya in her talk, doesn't do justice
to its beauty.
We're in Iron County,
whose name is apt since there was, and is, a lot of iron here. In particular many of the rocks contain iron
which, given the chance to oxidize, produces vivid red and orange colors. Other rocks, deposited under Lake
Claron, weren't able to oxidize and
are white, or light colored. The result
is a large basin with irregular sides, including some columns of rock known as
hoodoos, all of which is layered in different colors. It's breathtaking and never crowded with
people.
You can stand at the overlook near the visitor center and be
awed by the multicolored walls of the amphitheater, and by the view down the
open sides of the amphitheater all the way to Cedar
City, 5,000ft lower in
altitude. You can also hike trails
varying in difficulty from a relatively flat 2 mile roundtrip paved trail to a
4 mile rugged trail with multiple up and down sections. What they all have in common is lots of views
of the stunning amphitheater from different spots. You actually don't have to go anywhere to
savor different color combinations of colors of rocks - all you need do is wait
for the sun to go behind a cloud, or go lower in the sky, and yet another color
combination takes your breath away. This
is our 5th year coming, mainly for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar
City. But we always take time to come up to Cedar
Breaks and this year, with multiple nights here, we're able to take out time
and enjoy it to the full.
After the ranger talk on Friday we walk the paved trail to
Sunset Point, which takes us from the amphitheater rim, through a nature trail
featuring delicious currants (we leave most for the animals), various pine and
spruce trees and flowers including an exotic thistle, across an alpine meadow
and eventually to another breathtaking view of the amphitheater. We identify numerous bird species and a cute
chipmunk, but no larger animals, then visit the gift shop where I arrange for
Vicky to adopt a pika. This cute little
rodent - think of a very fat mouse with no tail - inhabits the high mountain
plateaus and although we don't see any today, Vicky has helped with the conservation
and we now have a cute pika to add to our collection of stuffed animals in the
bedroom. Quill can't figure out why we
do this, since we have her. Why bring
home stuffed animals when you have a cute Abby?
Time for dinner of homemade chile accompanied by Vicky's
first attempt at fry bread. It doesn't
taste or look anything like what we had on the Hopi reservation but it really
melds well with Vicky's inventive chile.
Now it's time to drive over for the sunset walk with the ranger. Vicky decides to give it a miss as she's tired
from our earlier walk, and the temperature has cooled considerably. I decide to dress up warm (shirt, sweater,
jacket and gloves (and yes, I was wearing jeans) and join the hike. On the way over I pause to observe a family of
deer with 3 cute fawns, then brake to avoid two deer crossing the road.
It turns out we're walking the same 2 mile roundtrip paved
trail that Vicky and I did earlier, but it's a wholly different
experience. In the early part of the hike there's enough
light for the ranger to identify various plants to us and talk about how
animals use them, but soon, despite the full moon and the cloudless night,
we're able to see lots of stars and planets.
Both the ranger and a volunteer who accompanies us are amateur
astronomers. So we quickly learn to
identify Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, all of which are clearly visible.
When we reach Sunset Point and after we've gaped in awe at
the amphitheater in moonlight, we're given a tour of the heavens and show how
to identify constellations from the Big Dipper (The Plough to you folks of
British extraction!) to Cassiopeia as well as the Milky Way. The ranger tells us that every star in the
sky is part of a constellation and when I ask her which constellation our sun
is part of she says nobody has ever asked her that. Shawn, the volunteer I mentioned, goes
further by saying that from our point of view the sun visits different
constellations at different times, but if another planet with a different star
as its sun were inhabited, no doubt people there would place our sun in one of
their constellations.
We take it easy on the return, but for the last quarter mile
or so my body tells me it's not used to walking 4 miles in one day at an
altitude of over 10,000ft, so I'm glad to get home. Vicky kindly left the lights on and the
curtains open so I could find the RV in the dark, but with the full moon it's
no problem anyway - and I really didn't feel cold at all except for my
hands. needless to say I slept well.
Saturday we sleep late.
Vicky and I both have work to do - she a writing assignment and me class
preparation. So it's mid afternoon
before we venture out. This time we
decide to attack another 2 mile trail - the Alpine Pond Trail. This is a loop - a lower trail and an upper trail
- around (guess what?) an alpine pond.
It's not paved and quite rough and steep in places, especially the lower
loop which descends several hundred feet from the road to the pond and then
climbs back up again. But with the help
of a trail guide and 25 numbered markers, we learn about everything from how to
tell a spruce tree from a pine tree (the shape of the needles, and whether the
cones grow up or down) to how marmots and pikas make their homes in rocks, and
how they survive winter (marmots eat all summer, get fat and then sleep through
the winter, pikas make caches of food to help them through the snow covered
months).
Unfortunately we don't see any of the above, but we do
encounter a deer and various squirrels and birds. We hiked the more difficult lower trail first
and as we come near the end of the loop we're glad we did, since 2 miles of
rugged trail is even more tiring than 4 miles of paved trail. So after dinner we're happy to curl up with
Quill (Cosette finds her own place) and sleep.
A great 2 days and although we're leaving tomorrow we'll be
back later in the week.
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