Cedar Pass is the break in the Wall where the road drops from the upper prairie to the lower. Early motorists remembered it for scrub cedar and steaming radiators. The modern road still crosses a landslide here, and geologists rate the slides under this road as active.
You've just topped Cedar Pass. Old Northeast Road comes up on your left, gravel, so stay on the pavement. That climb was roughly two hundred thirty feet in a mile. A visitor in the late nineteen twenties wrote that the passes get more crooked and the grades more steep. Scrub cedar lined both sides. There is a thrill in that drive, the visitor said. By taking it slowly, the risk is small. The road you just climbed has a problem that visitor never had. It crosses a major landslide, and the slide keeps breaking the pavement. The big fix in two thousand one was expected to hold five to ten years. The rangers' own newsletter called it a band-aid. In twenty twenty-two about fifty yards of one lane failed. Vampire Peak stood near here, said to be named for its bats, and one of its two spires had come down by nineteen fifty.
Photo: Renee Bieretz, Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS SD-25-9 (CT), Library of Congress, public domain · Public domain