OUTDOOR SOUTHWEST - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

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Autumn Vistas In
Utah's Markagunt
An October Travel Suggestion by Frank Jensen
THE STEAK WAS delicious and seemed
to go hand in glove with the crisp
autumn night. Outside, a neon sign
blinked on and off, advertising Milt's Stage
Stop, five miles from Cedar City, Utah,
in Cedar Canyon.
Inside, a fire roared in one corner of the
dining room where a rustic stone fireplace
climbed the wall.
A smiling, good looking woman of about
30 moved among the tables. "Everything
all right?" she asked in her best American-
Swiss accent. She was Maria Fehr, wife
of the chef, Emil, who had learned the
culinary arts in his homeland. The Fehrs
came to Cedar City in 1952 at the behest
of an uncle.
This pleasant interlude was a fitting climax
on an autumn weekend spent camping
and fishing in the Cedar Mountain area.
Earlier in the day we had taken one last
spin around Navajo Lake, trolling for the
wary rainbows. The late afternoon drive
back to Cedar City was through kaleidoscopic
October colors, and a short sidetrip
to Cedar Breaks brought us to a dazzling
sunset. But, I'm getting ahead of my
story.
It is sometimes difficult to appreciate
your own backyard, particularly when it
offers an abundance of outdoor pleasures. A
superintendent of one of the Southern Utah
National Parks told me of a complaint by
a late season visitor. "Your rangers describe
the beauties of the park in the summer
or show pictures of it in the winter,"
the man said. "Nothing is ever said about
the three fall months." The visitor was
right. In the opinion of most folks who
travel this country, autumn is the best time
to visit Southern Utah. It is an idyllic
season when temperatures mellow and
leaves turn from green to colors of gold
and amber, heralding another Indian summer.
If 1 were asked to name one place in
Utah where all of autumn's beauties were
encompassed in one trip, my choice would
have to be the mountain drive east of
Cedar City. Utah Highway 14 leaves U.S.
91 at this cosmopolitan Mormon community,
passes briefly through an aspen covered
canyon, then twists its way up the side
of a 10,000 foot mountain.
The name Cedar Mountain is strictly a
local appellation. In the strict sense of the
word, it is not a mountain at all, but a
plateau—a tabletop highland that is part
of the high plateau system of the Colorado
River Basin. Its name on the maps is the
Markagunt, a Paiute word meaning the
"highland of the trees."
Twenty miles east of Cedar City the
highway widens slightly where a sign identifies
the place as the Zion Overview. There
is no other marker and there would be no
point in attempting to tabloid the panorama
that greets the visitor here by a mere sign.
Clarence Dutton, the rather literary geologist
of the 1880s, said of it: "From the
southwest salient of the Markagunt we behold
one of the most sublime spectacles
which characterize the loftiest standpoints
of the plateau province."
From this vantage, the plateau drops
2000 feet to join the Kolob Terrace in a
FALL SCENE IN CEDAR CANYON, 10 MILES FROM CEDAR CITY
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October, 1961 / Desert Magazine / 41