The Mystery Park: Capitol Reef

We left Bryce on July 5 and headed for Capitol Reef National Park, the one park that we knew very little about.  When I asked David why he had it starred as a place to visit he said, “Because it is a national park.”

 It turns out that it is quite interesting, although not full of noteworthy photographic moments like the other parks.  We found that it was named Capitol because the settlers thought that some of the white formations looked like our nation's capitol dome and reef because the settlers used nautical references and some of the formations looked like barrier reefs.

First of all, it is the site of a historic Mormon settlement, Fruita, a village of never more than 10 families, founded in the mid 1800’s, where they raised…you guessed it…fruit.  And we actually camped in one of the orchards and in season, all the fruit, in all the surrounding orchards, are free to pick.  Nothing was in season while we were there, but we bought some local jam from the museum there and took a photo of the one room schoolhouse. In the campsite next to ours was a man who made banjos and he showed us one whose back he had crafted from a tree in his yard. Here is a photo of our campsite.

Our first full day we had our first experience with RAIN.  This was the first time we had seen rain since we left Schwenksville, and it wasn’t very intrusive.  We took a wonderful walk along a boardwalk and saw some great petroglyphs, with a terrible ranger talk.

Then we drove to the defining geological feature of the park, the Waterpocket Fold which is a flat valley surrounded by two upheaval cliffs.  It was a wonderful, long visual treat, but a little bit tense since we had to drive down the mountain over dirt roads and switchbacks. Here is a photo of the terrain we drove through. I thought it was pretty bad but little did I know what was to come in Canyonland.

The next day we walked through a canyon bottom, much like the Zion narrows walk, but without the water.  It was there that we saw some great 1800’s graffiti.  

We also walked to some tanks (depressions in the rocks) with water in them, and then saw a great arch.  We could actually walk up to and under this arch.  It was our first arch, but did, in no way prepare us for Arches national park.

Capitol Reef was a restful park and gave us the strength to do Moab.