Point Supreme,Cedar Breaks National Monument - Brian Head, Utah - American Guide Series on Waymarking.com

Point Supreme; a car can be driven to the very edge of this amazing break.

At Point Supreme, Cedar Breaks is suddenly and magnificently present. It is hard to tell whether the brilliant coloring of the Breaks or its grotesque sculpting is the more remarkable. In the former, forty-seven tints have been counted by an artist; and in the latter, though the variety is less astonishing than in Bryce, the formations nevertheless run the gamut from cathedrals to tombstones. For those who gaze into this enormous basin, the physical aspects suggest a multitude of similes. It is surprising to find a natural amphitheater so huge and at the same time so perfect. As one gazes down upon the hundreds of columns and towers, balconies and pinnacles, arches, gateways and standing walls, it is not difficult to pretend that an ancient civilization, with an architectural taste for the Gothic, was once crowded into this huge bowl. High against the orange rim is a cream-colored shelf fashioned in a broad arc. When brought close with powerful glasses it is seen to be of remarkable perfection, as though a mason had laid it carefully stone by stone. Just beyond it, and below the rim, are soft golden flanks that lie like painted hills. The ancient builders were prodigal with their paint, and must have spilled it by the barrels. It is equally obvious that for brilliant hues they had the passion of a Titian.

Upon the next level below, and on the far side, is an area resembling a large cemetery wherein all the dead were given a monument of the same formidable size. Below these are the ruins of two gigantic structures that some might fancy as cathedrals and others as medieval castles, with their walls laid in big blocks of old rose and coral and burnt orange, their windows and doorways tumbled in. Still farther down, the structures are more crumbling still, and have the clean wind-swept beauty that only the ruins of once beautiful architecture can have. There are high thin walls, thin as blades, standing alone, as though the other walls had fallen and long ago disappeared. Of what was once a noble edifice, there may be left only a solitary tower or an arch or a colony of thin spires. So many mansions have disintegrated and fallen that the floor of the amphitheater is pie deep with ruins.

One can fancy that some prehistoric sculptor of gigantic size had his workshop in the Breaks and set out to carve from forty-seven tints in stone. Of insatiable ambition and undirected purpose, he left nothing finished, nor perhaps even fully realized what he was trying to do. In the center close to the floor in the fine Greek arch of a medieval castle or the entrance to a court. The Great Sculptor build the gateway, then left it standing in isolation of its own. If glasses are used to bring the craftsmanship closer, a huge bronze statue of a woman holding a babe to her left breast, with the babe's face to her left cheek, is seen to the right. The Sculptor must have liked this creation, for it is the most nearly finished piece of his stupendous graveyard of forgotten things. Centrally placed in regards to breadth and depth is a person with head bowed in prayer before an altar; and a hundres yards to the left on the same plane, is, ironically enough, an almost flawless dress-shop dummy. In the same plane, too, but far to the left, is a kneeling group. For the most part, however, the sculptor's genius seems to have been devoted to rough designs in cathedrals and castles, to promenades and minarets, to weird totems tht stand row on row, to mountainside cemeteries in which everyone rests under a tombstone unsurpassed in size and splendor by his neighbor's, or to great solitary obelisks to time and the wind.