A Day of Strange Sights

Cedar Breaks National Monument


Today was a day of strange sights. We started our day with a visit to the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Visitors’ Center to see what they have for our next trip this way. In the yard was a huge weeping willow that was alive with yellow jackets drinking rain water from the leaves. You could actually hear the whole tree buzz. Then we unsuccessfully scoured the prairies on the sides of the road for the rare and elusive (at least for us) Utah prairie dog. Next we drove through the Red Canyon in the Dixie National Forest. It was beautiful with spires and hoodoos in bright red all over the place. Our next sight was the valley of the Sevier River. It was full of ranches with cattle grazing all over the place. There were beautiful cottonwoods in the most wonderful shade of gold/orange all along the river. We turned west onto Utah 14 and came across huge lava beds! They were like the ones in the Gifford Pinchot Natl. Forest in WA but even larger! Our next stop was the Cedar Breaks National Monument where we were in SNOW! At 10,000’. Cedar Breaks is a canyon of more columns and hoodoos. With the snow it was beautiful. We were on our way to Ely, Nevada on US 50. If you look at your map you will see that US 50 is quite a ways north of Cedar City with no real connecting roads so we went on the tiny red line roads. The surfaces were fine but there were not many people out there nor were there many curves in the road. We would go over a hill and see the road go absolutely straight across the next valley. It seemed that all the turns were on the hills. Rain storms were blowing through but didn’t hit us too bad. However they made the edges of the valleys all fuzzy. Very cool. Bear had his moment of aerobic exercise when two deer jumped onto the road right in front of us. I was so proud of him – he remembered not to swerve to avoid them, he just braked and held his line. At our motel in Ely we saw an absolutely brilliant rainbow with a very light faded one right next to it. Then it was dinner in a cell in the Jailhouse Restaurant. All in all, a day of strange and wonderful things.