ABSTRACT
There is a National Monument in southwestern Utah named Cedar Breaks. Far smaller than Bryce Canyon, its larger cousin to the east, Cedar Breaks imitates Bryce’s iron-filled pastel limestone spires without reproducing them. Far less controversial than Grand Staircase-Escalante, its recently monumentalized neighbor to the southeast, it barely calls attention to itself, Perched on the edge of a semicircular bowl of hoodoos and spires eroded by prehistoric oceans, the visitor’s center puts up an unassuming front, a cabin made of logs with picture windows out toward the view and a collection of the usual bird-and-flower identification books inside. Quiet and often overlooked, the monument and its parking lot hold more visitors and their vehicles from other parts of the country than from its native state of Utah. German, Japanese, and Spanish are heard as often as English on the trails and the campgrounds. Cedar Breaks is both usual and unusual; an international clientele flocks to a location most locals pass quickly on their way to Bryce, Zion, and Grand Canyon national parks. In a sense, Cedar Breaks thrives on the fact that it is found in only one certain irreducible location on the face of the earth, a place where all who want to know it must come and see for themselves.
