Cedar Breaks

When I started my first road trip of 2019, I knew my first stop would be Cedar Breaks National Monument, located just east of Cedar City, Utah.  There were a couple of reasons for camping here, one that it's usually very uncrowded and so you pretty much have the pick of campgrounds.  A second reasons was there was an earth cache in the park that I wanted to find so I could complete a geocaching challenge of finding an earth cache in four different states on the same day.  As it was, I'd already found an earth cache south of where I was, but camping there still made sense as it was a good jumping off point for my next day's adventures.

I've camped in Cedar Breaks previously and it really is a good jumping off point for various spots around Utah that we have wanted to explore.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Cedar Breaks, I think I can best describe it as a miniature version of Bryce Canyon National Park.  It doesn't attract the visitors that Bryce Canyon does, mainly because there's not nearly as much to do there.  The features in the park are nice, but you can't hike down into them the way you can at Bryce Canyon and that's by far and away the best feature, to be able to hike among them.  And so it becomes more of a jumping off place.  You walk the rim, you look down on the hoodoos below you and then you move on.

But, apparently, the word is out that this is a nice place to visit.  When I got there around 5:30 in the evening, the campground was pretty much filled, so I didn't have a great deal of choice in spot, but I was still able to snag a nice spot for the night.  Once I had camp set up and dinner in my belly, I decided to head out on a hike because I still had plenty of daylight.

Because I've been there previously, I decided to take a trail I hadn't explored before which was the Alpine Pond Trail which led off of the Chessman Ridge Overlook and walked along the eastern edge of the amphitheater of Cedar Breaks, leading to an alpine lake at 10,400 feet of elevation.

It was a pretty much level hike because most of the park where visitors are is all above 10,000 feet, but the air was thin. I probably overdid it a little bit on this hike for a couple of reasons.  One, I was running out of daylight and I wanted to get some good shots while there was still light and two, which is in hindsight, I was a little bit dehydrated after driving all day.  I definitely had not kept up a sufficient amount of fluids in my system that day and I was going to pay for it later with a little bit of altitude sickness.

Another reason I decided to take the trail was also to escape some very loud college students who decided to park themselves out on Chessman Overlook and scream at each other from 3 feet away or so.  Seriously?  You're 3 feet away from each other and you feel the need to scream?  I can already hear my daughter in my head saying, "GET OFF MY LAWN."  It didn't really matter, because I escaped the noise by hiking away from it, and when I came back, they were gone and I had the overlook to myself.

The hike was very peaceful and I had lots of opportunities to see the amphitheater through the trees.  There were lots of wildflowers alongside the trail: Scarlet paintbrush, Colorado Columbine and Shootingstar being the most abundant that I saw.  The trail followed a creek that flowed down into the breaks and eventually led to the pond. I followed that creek to the alpine pond where I was rewarded with some very nice reflections of the sun glowing off of the trees along the opposite bank.  I lingered there taking several different photos with different exposures hoping that one of them would turn out decently, then decided to take the same trail back to the overlook which was a very good decision.

Had I taken the trail in a loop instead of an up and back, I would have missed the sunset on the rim. After enjoying the sunset and taking a multitude of shots, I drove back to my campground and settled down for the night, hoping to have a restful night sleep.  Unfortunately, the high altitude did me in that night and I didn't sleep very well due to headache and upset stomach.  Fortunately, fluids and food the next morning, plus a drop in elevation leaving the monument helped me recover rapidly. In the past, I've always slept well at Cedar Breaks and the only thing I can attribute all of this too was my intake of fluids during the drive up there from Southern California.  I didn't have any problem the rest of the trip, even though I was at altitude for most of the trip.  I made sure I was properly hydrated and was probably acclimated to the altitude as well.

In the morning, I walked along the rim, taking photographs, checking out the visitors center when it opened and just enjoying the sights the park had to offer before I hit the road again.  I could hear Utah's oldest geocache calling my name.

To be continued.....