If you need a break from the heat in Bryce Canyon or Zion, head up into the mountains to Cedar Breaks National Monument. Standing at over 10,000 feet of elevation, the weather is drastically cooler than the surrounding parks. I was reluctant to make the trip at first, after reading reviews online saying the monument was just a miniature version of Bryce, which we’d already seen. That’s not accurate though, because while the erosion isn’t on the scale of Bryce, there is a completely different landscape surrounding the park.

View from the rim of Cedar Breaks National Monument with orange eroded slopes and green forested mountains stretching out
Layered red rock canyon at Cedar Breaks National Monument with evergreen trees in the foreground under a cloudy sky

We had the good fortune to have visited on the same day as the annual wildflower festival! Rangers handed out “Wildflower Bingo” checklists to the kids, and once completed, they exchanged them for lovely posters. Besides seeing an impressive variety of wildflowers, we were also entertained by the antics of chipmunks, squirrels, and even a few marmots sightings.

A girl in a pink long sleeve shirt crouching on a forest trail to look at wildflowers while an adult pushes a stroller
Note our long sleeves and jackets, even in the middle of July.
A child's hands in a pink sleeve holding a cluster of small white southern ligusticum wildflowers at Cedar Breaks
Southern Ligusticum
A pale lavender Colorado columbine with long spurs in close up against a blurred brown background at Cedar Breaks
Colorado Columbine
A squirrel standing in the grass nibbling a seed among yellow wildflowers at Cedar Breaks National Monument

At this point in our Utah stay, we’d moved our camper from near Orderville, up to a boondocking site in the Dixie National Forest, just east of the Red Canyon Visitors Center. Our only neighbors were cows that would graze nearby, and walk through our campsite a few times a day.

Cows grazing on a grassy hillside with scattered pines beneath a blue sky, seen from the camper's front door near Red Canyon
Our view out the front door

At Red Canyon we took a short hike through the red hoodoos and pinyon pine trees. The visitor center was small, but had interesting displays, and excellent advice from the friendly attendants, complete with detailed hiking maps.

A man and a girl posing with a beaver statue wearing a worker hat outside the Red Canyon Visitors Center
We met a celebrity.
Red hoodoo spires rising in layered rock formations at Red Canyon with a hiking trail winding between them
Capped hoodoo pillars standing on a rocky ledge at Red Canyon with pines and a cloudy sky
A red sandstone cliff with hoodoos and boulders at its base at Red Canyon, pines growing on top and below
The darker caprock is more resistant to erosion than the softer red sandstone.
A girl in a green t shirt smiling in front of a yellow rock wall with pink patches at Red Canyon
Some of the cliff faces were yellow with patches of pink and sparkling quartz.
A close up of a red rock with white quartz patches resting on a pile of broken orange rocks at Red Canyon
Beautiful glittering patches of quartz in the colorful sandstone
Two children hugging tall pinyon pine trees on a trail at Red Canyon with red rocks behind them
Sniffing trees–did you know that Pinyon Pines smell like butterscotch?!
Looking up at a dying pinyon pine with its twisted bare branches reaching toward a pale sky at Red Canyon
A dying pinyon pine shows us how they grow, twisting upward.
A girl in a green shirt sitting in a red rock alcove making peace signs at Red Canyon with a yucca in front