Cedar Breaks National Monument

Sophia looking out from the top of the breaks.

The second to last place we worked was at Cedar Breaks National Monument.  The view is breathtaking, as are the views at many of the nearby parks, such as Zion and Capitol Reef, due to whatever geological happenings took place to create a zone of abrupt 5,000 foot transition from basin floor up to the Colorado Plateau.  A "breaks" is the most abrupt, as it is what remains when you replace a gentle mountainside with a canyon wall.

Beautiful red rocks and hoodoos fill up the breaks.  A breaks is when a mountainside is removed and instead there is an amphitheater like canyon wall.  Cedar Breaks has high altitude bristlecone pine that precariously rest on red rock cliffs and arches. Hoodoos are the spires in the picture above made famous by Bryce Canyon.

In southern Utah, canyon wall means dramatic red rock.  We were repairing fence along the edge of the park to keep the sheep out.  Lucky for us, the edge of the park goes to the edge of the break.  It's tough to beat a summer job of relatively easy work in a place with a view that stretches for hundreds of miles.  We were the last UCC crew to come through, so our boss didn't have very much for us to do.  We spent our time repairing washed out steps in the campground, digging up boulders, and chopping up wood.  It was good times.  Our last night we pulled out the dutch oven, prepared a feast, and went to bed better fed than any other souls in Iron County that night.

Civilian Conservation Corpsmembers built this structure on top of Brian Head (11,300 feet) to make digesting the view a more comfortable experience (Arizona, Nevada, the Great Salt Lake, and miles out on the Colorado Plateau are visible).  They did this by hand.  They probably built the road up there too.. by hand.

Hillary telling the story of The Colossus of Clout calling his shot while in character as Squints.  The story mostly contained the following happy refrain: "And he liked it!  A lot!!"