No Permanent Address: Capitol Reef

I admit it: I’ve been procrastinating this blog post. It’s just that doing Capitol Reef National Park justice will take more than my words can achieve. So instead, our photographs must do the heavy lifting.

I will say that our love for this park is not necessarily because of the hiking, although it does offer amazing scenery. The views to and from Navajo Knobs, for example, take second place to nothing else. Our combination of the Cohab Canyon, Frying Pan, and Grand Wash trails made for an excellent day hike, too. Capitol Reef also gave us our first experience in a slot canyon, and we found Pleasant Creek to be aptly named.

Even so, hiking is not the Reef’s secret ingredient. For us, Fruita sets Capitol Reef apart, and that’s hard to admit because the parks are supposed to be protecting wilderness and Fruita is not wild. A bucolic Garden of Eden, yes, but not wilderness. This magical place is nestled in a valley along the western edge of the Reef at the confluence of Sulphur Creek and the Fremont River. In addition to protecting the unique geology of the Reef, the park service also conveys the recent history of Fruita as a Mormon farming community. Hundreds of fruit trees planted by the settlers and maintained by the park service surround the Fruita campground. It’s an idyllic setting and for these two farm kids, well, I guess you cannot completely remove our cultivating impulse.

I hope to tell more stories here about Fruita and the people we met there—but if not on these pages, then we will share these tales elsewhere. Later, for example, you can ask me about my full-moon hike, or our outdoor viewing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or the singing biologist. For now I’ll let the pictures say how special Capitol Reef is.

Capitol Reef, geology classroom. The Reef is a 100-mile long monocline, or fold in the earth. The fold becomes more obvious the more altitude one gains, as we did on the Navajo Knobs hike.