Cedar Breaks: The Colosseum Above Ten Thousand Feet
Near Cedar City, Utah
Twenty miles east of Cedar City, the Markagunt Plateau drops away into one of the most spectacular geological formations in the American Southwest. Cedar Breaks National Monument is a natural amphitheater carved by erosion into the edge of the plateau, more than three miles across and nearly two thousand feet deep, its walls colored in shades of red, orange, pink, and cream by iron and manganese oxides in the limestone, shale, and sandstone layers.
The formation looks superficially like Bryce Canyon, and that similarity is not accidental. Both were created by the same erosional processes on adjacent sections of the same geological uplift. But Cedar Breaks sits significantly higher, with a rim elevation of around ten thousand feet, roughly one to two thousand feet above the rim at Bryce. That extra altitude produces a dramatically different ecosystem. Ancient bristlecone pine trees, some of the oldest living organisms on earth, grow in gnarled tangles along the rim, their twisted forms shaped by thousands of years of wind, cold, and thin air.
The monument was established in nineteen thirty-three. Its name carries the same misidentification as Cedar City itself: the juniper trees growing at the base of the formation were called cedars by early settlers, and the word breaks is an old term for badlands or broken terrain. Cedar Breaks means, more or less, juniper badlands, which is a less romantic name than the view deserves. The monument receives far fewer visitors than Bryce Canyon despite offering comparable scenery, partly because its road closes every winter under deep snow, and partly because people who have already stopped at Bryce tend not to drive another forty miles for what they assume will be more of the same. It is not more of the same.
