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.

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.

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.

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.