Part 1

Copyright 1925 by W. H. Murray GENERAL PASSENGER AGENT Union Pacific System OMAHA, NEB.

ZION NATIONAL PARK BRYCE CANYON CEDAR BREAKS KAIBAB FOREST NORTH RIM OF GRAND CANYON

ISSUED BY THE Union Pacific System

The Land of Flaming Canyons and Jeweled Amphitheatres

_Touched by a light that hath no name,_ _A glory never sung,_ _Aloft on sky and mountain wall,_ _Are God’s great pictures hung._ --_Whittier_

Southward from the thirty-eighth parallel of latitude the surface of Western Utah descends in magnificent “Cyclopean steps” from the flattened summits of the Wasatch Mountains, 11,000 feet high, to 3,000 feet at the _Rio Virgen_, then ascends gently in Arizona to the colossal arch of the Kaibab Plateau, 9,000 feet in elevation and overlooking the Grand Canyon. These Titanic terraces and palisaded plateaus, more particularly the flaming canyons and jeweled amphitheatres cut from their color-saturated rock layers, form scenic spectacles without peer or rival on the globe. Nothing else is comparable to these wonderlands. To see them is both a thrilling adventure and an artistic delight.

Measured by civilization’s yardstick, the unknown land in which they lie is a frontier, still in the pioneer stage of existence. It is not so long since the forts along the way actually repelled Indian attacks; it is not so far to fastnesses where cougars come forth to prey on deer, or to desert valleys where wild mustangs range. On the edge of the plains are ruins of primitive dwellings of which the modern Indian knows nothing; in many a secluded canyon are the more inscrutable habitations of the cliff dwellers. The indomitable ranchers have built quaint, poplar-shaded villages with homes of adobe, and their farms are often fenced with stone.

It is a mysterious land of purple sage and empurpled distances, of incredible color, of sun-magic and the wizardry of wind and water. It is a place to drink in beauty, to form new conceptions of the divine.

Geologists recognize three subdivisions of the region from north to south: the High Plateaus; the Terraced Plateaus; the Grand Canyon Platform. From Cedar Breaks on the High Plateau it is more than 100 miles to Bright Angel Point on Grand Canyon’s rim; from Hurricane Ledge on the west, eastward to the Colorado River is more than 100 miles.

The country reveals fascinating chapters of geologic history. It is a region that has undergone great transitions, alternately sea bottom and mountain top; a region broken and tilted by tremendous displacements; a region scorched and branded by intense volcanic action; but more than all else, from the viewpoint of human interest, a region profoundly sculptured and given its most distinctive character by the beauty-creating genius of erosion.

From Cedar Breaks, cut into mountains 11,000 feet high, the vision has a sweep of 100 miles, and the vast terraces may be seen thrust out to the south like promontories into the sea. Where one succeeds another, the uppermost presents sinuous cliff walls, hundreds of miles in length and superbly distinctive in color and carving. More than 10,000 feet of strata are exposed, “a library of the ages in vivid bindings” that contains the fossil remains of creatures since the morning of life on earth. Each step down indicates the removal, by streams, rain, frost and wind, of all the rock-layers above it. From the Grand Canyon Platform, these 10,000 feet of strata have been completely swept away.[1]

The highest of the Terraced Plateaus, the Markagunt and Paunsaugunt, in which Cedar Breaks and Bryce Canyon lie, break down in spired palisades of the Pink Cliffs, endless in sculptured variety. Beneath the Markagunt the southern scarps of the Kolob Plateau, into which flaming Zion Canyon is sunk, form noble cliffs of pure, reposeful white. The next step downward displays the glowing Vermilion Cliffs, castellated with ornate prodigality and perhaps the grandest of all. Lower still are the Shinarump Cliffs, banded with reds, browns, yellows, greens and purples. Between them and the Kaibab lies a stretch of desert like a flattened rainbow. Such is the strange, magnificent and colorful structure of the land.

Zion Canyon is a profound gorge with the colors of blood, fire and snow, a matchless carving by the greatest of all sculptors, erosion. Several of its mighty rock temples rank with the most majestic masses in the land. The variety of its endless etchings, the exquisite harmonies of its painted precipices, the sustained grandeur of its stupendous buttes and walls, its glorious cycle of color from dawn to sunset are sources of undimmed delight to the artistic instinct within everyone. It has one aspect of beauty from its green-garbed floor, another from its dizzy rim of white; from the dusky depths of the Narrows the dominant sensation is soul-gripping awe.

Zion National Park includes other canyons of extraordinary interest, and the entire terrace-top of the broad Kolob Plateau is a domain of incredibly fantastic formations.

Cedar Breaks, the highest of Utah’s jeweled amphitheatres, is a place of wild and lofty beauty, a series of vast sculptured basins sunk into the summits of the mountains. Endless outflung bastions and buttresses, supporting towers, parapets and craggy spires, parade from the rim down into the painted abyss where, dotted by the green of pines, red, orange, yellow, purple and white are banded and splashed in a symphony of color literally unbelievable till the eyes confirm.

Bryce Canyon also is an amphitheatre, a richer, more compacted bit of resplendence. You hardly believe that Bryce Canyon exists until you have gazed many times; so amazing is its beauty that it seems like the flashing vision of a dream. It is something heretofore unknown and unsuspected in scenery--a miracle of erosion, a peerless fantasy of color. From its depths, in pairs, in groups, in clusters, in hosts and in myriads, leap to the eyes the most amazingly bizarre forms, slender, dainty, bulky, grotesque--a bewildering combination of heaven and hell in which the angelic easily predominates. These myriad forms, human, animal and geometrical, lighted with unearthly radiance, seem to dance from their celestial castles and gorgeous grottoes to meet the beholder. Bryce contains all that architecture, all that sculpture knows, in one great glory hole painted pink, red, white, orange and purple.

What magic the morning and the evening sun performs on the pigmented palisades of this unique land! A dull rust red a moment ago, that distant peristyle now glows like fiery embers; the whites are more dazzlingly white and caressingly soft; the orange tones are enriched; the purple shadows swarm like birds. Colors flit mysteriously from salient to salient as if some one back stage were focusing spotlights. Dormant, crouching bulks rise, stretch and add to their girths, decking themselves in their most splendid raiment to bid farewell to the master of ceremonies, the vivifying sun.

Farther to the south is the Kaibab Forest and the North Rim of Grand Canyon, remote from traveled ways. Kaibab National Forest is the largest and most beautiful virgin forest in the United States. Beneath the stately pines, spruces and firs, the grassy forest floor is as clean as a carefully groomed lawn, and there are many open parks, aspen encircled, of bewitching charm. Numberless deer roam unmolested through this fairy forest and the rare white-tailed squirrel flits ghostlike through its aisles. There Roosevelt hunted and discriminating beauty-lovers have sought the region for years.

Words are of little avail to describe the Grand Canyon. Across the great plateau the Colorado River has cut a series of canyons about 220 miles long, a mile in depth and twelve miles in width. The Kaibab division is the deepest and wildest part of the Grand Canyon and presents its sublimest scenes. On the North Rim are some of the most celebrated of all the viewpoints, though known only to a few hundred adventurous travelers--Bright Angel Point, Point Sublime, Point Imperial, Cape Final and Cape Royal.

The way is now prepared for you to see these miracle places of America in comfort.

Cedar City to Zion National Park

The highway southward from Cedar City (the Zion Park Highway) is on the floor of an arm of prehistoric Lake Bonneville. This is the Great Basin region, a sort of prison for running water because none of its streams ever reach the sea. In the east are the steep scarps of the Markagunt and Kolob Plateaus limited by a tremendous fault plane, the Hurricane Ledge; in the west are the Iron Mountains, veritable masses of iron ore; in the south are the lofty, majestic Pine Valley Mountains, extinct volcanoes whose dark, wrinkled summits exceed 10,000 feet in elevation.

Hamilton’s Fort, a few miles from Cedar City, was once a frontier outpost, the scene of several battles with Indians. Near the village of Kanarra the route passes over the rim of the Great Basin and enters the Colorado River watershed. Here Hurricane Ledge lifts more sharply into prominence, a precipitous rampart of gray and red rock mottled by piñons and junipers. The surface on which the road lies is the same as that on top of the ledge; the land in the valley either dropped hundreds of feet or the plateau was upthrust an equal distance. Hurricane Fault, as geologists call it, is the most striking displacement in the West. It extends from the volcanic Tushar Mountains, north of Cedar City, along the base of the Markagunt Plateau and southward across the Grand Canyon, a total distance of more than 200 miles.

The road now follows Ash Creek, a tributary of the Virgin, over lava flows where prickly pears, pin-cushion cacti, yucca, torchweed and miner’s candlesticks grow among the sage brush. Thereabouts the first view is had of the Valley of the Virgin, Utah’s “Dixie,” a tumbled region of low mesas, black volcanic cones, lava fields and dunes of cherry-red sand, settled by Mormon colonists in 1858. This “Dixie” section of Utah, about 3,000 feet in elevation, is sub-tropical in climate, grows a large variety of agricultural products including cotton and tobacco, and its poplar-shaded villages have a quaintness suggestive of foreign lands. One of the most picturesque communities is Toquerville, named after an Indian chief, and where the automobiles stop so that the traveler may purchase for small sums an amazing variety of delicious fruit: figs, pomegranates, grapes, melons, almonds, peaches, pears, plums and apricots. Along the village street, with its double row of poplars planted as windbreaks, are odd houses of adobe fenced with stone, seemingly asleep beneath their luxuriant fig trees; irrigation streams gurgle and sing with the cool seduction of flowing water in an arid land. The scene has a pastoral air of Biblical peace and plenty. Three miles south, the Harding Highway crosses La Verkin Creek, turns eastward, and begins to climb.

In an instant the scene changes completely. Long, buttressed and fretted mesa promontories parade solemnly into view, an endless array of marching mountains banded with buff, red, pink and gray, mountains that seem to have come from nowhere. Soon arises across the gray-green sage the huge rock cathedral called Smithsonian Butte, spired with silver and gray; and then, instantaneously dominating the entire landscape, there appears, at the gates of Zion, the West Temple of the Virgin. The transcendent beauty of this tremendous tinted temple of stone is best realized when irradiated by the morning or afternoon sun. The southern facade of the structure forms a sundial for the villages near by. The finest description is that of Captain C. E. Dutton, a celebrated geologist who, while in the service of the government, wrote in 1880:

Captain Dutton’s Description of the West Temple and the Gates of Zion

(_Somewhat Abridged_)

“In an hour’s time, we reached the crest of the isthmus, and in an instant there flashed before us a scene never to be forgotten. In coming time it will, I believe, take rank with a very small number of spectacles each of which will, in its own way, be regarded as the most exquisite of its kind which the world discloses.

“Across the canyon stands the central and commanding object of the picture, the Western Temple, rising 4,000 feet above the river. Its glorious summit was the object we had seen an hour before, and now the matchless beauty and majesty of its vast mass is all before us. Yet it is only the central object of a mighty throng of structures wrought up to the same exalted style and filling up the entire panorama. Right opposite us are the two principal forks of the Virgin, the Parunuweap coming from the east, and the Mukuntuweap, or Little Zion Valley, descending from the north. The Parunuweap is seen emerging through a stupendous gateway and chasm nearly 3,000 feet in depth. The further wall of this canyon swings northward and becomes the eastern wall of Little Zion Valley. As it sweeps down the Parunuweap, it breaks into great pediments covered all over with the richest carving. The effect is much like that which the architect of the Milan Cathedral appears to have designed, though here it is vividly suggested rather than fully realized. The sumptuous, bewildering, mazy effect is all there, but when we attempt to analyze it in detail it eludes us.

“The flank of the wall receding up the Mukuntuweap is for a mile or two similarly decorated, but soon breaks into new forms much more impressive and wonderful. A row of towers half a mile high is quarried out of the palisade and stands well advanced from its face. There is an eloquence to their forms which stirs the imagination with singular power and kindles in the mind of the dullest observer a glowing response.

“Directly in front of us a complex group of white towers, springing from a central pile, mounts upward to the clouds. Out of their midst, and high over all, rises a dome-like mass which dominates the entire landscape. It is almost pure white, with brilliant streaks of carmine descending its vertical walls. At the summit it is truncated and a flat tablet is laid upon the top, showing its edge of deep red. It is impossible to liken this object to any familiar shape, for it resembles none. Yet its shape is far from being indefinite; on the contrary it has definiteness and individuality which extort an exclamation of surprise when first beheld. Call it a dome; not because it has the ordinary shape of such a structure but because it performs the functions of a dome.

“The towers which surround it are of inferior mass and altitude, but each is a study of fine form and architectural effect. They are white above and change to rich red below. Dome and towers are planted upon a substructure no less admirable. A curtain wall 1,400 feet high descends vertically from the eaves of the temples and is succeeded by a steep slope of ever-widening base-courses leading down to the esplanade below. The curtain wall is decorated with a lavish display of vertical mouldings, and the ridges, eaves and mitred angles are fretted with serrated cusps. This ornamentation is repetitive, not symmetrical. But though exact symmetry is wanting, Nature has here brought home to us the truth that symmetry is only one of an infinite range of devices by which beauty can be realized.

_And finer forms are in the quarry_ _Than ever Angelo evoked!_

“Nothing can exceed the wondrous beauty of Little Zion Valley, which separates the two temples and their respective groups of towers.”

But the traveler has not yet reached the gates of Zion, although distant views continue to appear and disappear. The Virgin River is now near at hand on the right, a swift, moody, meandering stream whose red waters are the creators of the fertile farms along its banks and sometimes their destroyers. The foreground landscape is red, although the broad, sloping buttresses of the mesas, folded, fluted and flounced _ad infinitum_, display buffs, yellows, grays, browns and purples.

Near Virgin City there is a view northeastward of sensational Guardian Angel Pass. Across Great West Canyon, apparently, stands an immense dam of rock cleft by a rectangular aperture as regular as if cut by engineers; surmounting the barrier are two towering white cones, the ghostly guardians of the gap. Another fascinating feature of the panorama is the complex convergence of the battlemented mesa promontories from all directions except the south; these carved and tinted headlands actually seem to advance upon the beholder. In the east are the pinnacled spires of the Eagle Crags, shattered to dagger sharpness.

Rockville, another village beside the Virgin, was founded by Mormon pioneers in 1861, and was long an important telegraph station. There is a petrified forest in the vicinity.

About five miles beyond, the two profound chasms, the Mukuntuweap (Zion) and the Parunuweap, converge; and the two sublime domes, the East and West Temples, with their incredible crests of crimson bleeding down their pale precipices, soar above the rushing waters. Springdale, the last Mormon hamlet, is passed; then the Ranger Station at the southern boundary of Zion National Park.

Zion National Park

Legend and History

Zion National Park is a roughly quadrangular area of approximately 120 square miles, sixty-four miles by highway from Cedar City, and sixty miles on an air line north of the rim of Grand Canyon. It was set apart as a National Monument under its Indian name, _Mukuntuweap_, in 1909. In 1919 its area was enlarged, its name was changed to that given it by the Mormon pioneers, and it was made a National Park.

There are cliff dwelling ruins in Zion Canyon, more in Parunuweap Canyon, and the modern Indians had a reverent acquaintance with its solemn amphitheatres. Several interpretations are given of its Indian name, _Mukuntuweap_. Major Powell translated it “straight canyon;” another interpretation is “place of many waters;” still another is “place of the gods.” One legend declares that the Paru-sha-pats Indians once saw a light upon the West Temple and supposed it to be a signal fire to warn them of a Navajo raid. But they found that the West Temple is unscalable and decided that friendly rock spirits had produced a supernatural incandescence; and so, to them, it was “Rock-rover’s Land.”

It is certain that the Indians regarded Zion Canyon as a place sacred to spiritual beings; they laid their propitiatory offerings of flesh and fruit at the foot of the crimson crags of Sinawava and none would spend a night in their shadows.

Mormon colonists entered the region about 1858, began its patient reclamation by irrigation, and named the marvelous canyon Little Zion. Major Powell, the famous explorer-geologist reconnoitered the country in 1870. A few years later Captain Dutton studied it and in “The Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District,” now out of print, presented a picture that is “a classic of inspired description.” From that time until 1909, except for the visits of a few artists and travelers of the adventurous type, Zion was practically unknown. It may now be visited in perfect comfort. Several colleges have sent classes there for summer study.

Description

The outstanding feature of Zion National Park is Zion Canyon, the stupendous red and white gorge cut by the Mukuntuweap River from the Kolob Plateau through more than 3,000 feet of the Jurassic sandstones of the White and Vermilion cliffs and down into lower beds of mauve sandstone and shales of purple and red. The floor of Zion is 4,100 feet above sea level; the dome of the West Temple rises to 7,650 feet. The canyon is about fourteen miles long and varies in width from about a mile at Springdale to scarcely more than the reach of a man’s outstretched hands in the upper Narrows where the river has cut a channel under the towering cliffs. Imagine, if you can, the overwhelming effect of these painted precipices, nearly 2,000 feet high and both close enough to be touched without moving.

In places the canyon widens into courts and shrines of bewitching beauty, such as the Court of the Patriarchs and the Temple of Sinawava. From the vermilion walls have been chiseled individual buttes and peaks of monstrous greatness and surpassing majesty, among them Angels Landing, the Great White Throne and the Mountain of Mystery. And these soaring scarps and summits present such varied tints and hues of red that the expert in pigments is bewildered; from the delicate pink of a baby’s cheek to deepest carmine, and beyond--from bittersweet and orient pink through orange chrome, flame-scarlet, vermilion, jasper, Pompeiian red and Indian lake to mahogany, ox-blood, maroon and a red that is almost black. In places the walls are topped with creamy white and the green of pines. Everywhere they exhibit a wizardry of massive sculpture. The deep-set river is bordered with the verdure of cottonwoods, box-elders, pines, ferns and flowering shrubs; in mossy caves curtained by little waterfalls, deer cradle their fawns. The radiance of the morning and evening sun upon the tinted towers of Zion is among the finest of its spectacles.

Standing upon the edge of the Park near Springdale is The Watchman, a stately cathedral-like pile of red sandstone. About a mile beyond is Bridge Mountain upon whose upper slope may be discerned a great bow of stone, a natural bridge with a span of 100 feet. Among the Towers of the Virgin stands the Altar of Sacrifice, a buttressed white fane whose summit and wall are stained deep with flowing crimson, suggesting the bloody sacrificial place of some insatiable pagan god. The East Temple, on the right, is a splendid structure of pink and white surmounted by a carmine capstone.

On the left is the Streaked Wall bearing strange white cones, and beyond it is Sentinel Peak. The west wall then recedes to form the fine Court of the Patriarchs whence rise the three stately Patriarchs themselves, jagged pink and white pyramids. Above the east wall stand the Twin Brothers and the Mountain-of-the-Sun, the latter the first to glow in the light of dawn, the last to hold the evening rays. Lady Mountain, Mt. Majestic and Red Arch Mountain next appear, and Angels Landing, a sharp-shorn, pyramidal wedge of Pompeiian red that projects boldly into the canyon and throws off from its foot a fluted ox-blood mass called the Great Organ. Round this the river winds in a serpentine semicircle.

The Great White Throne