Capitol Reef National Park

Whew, I am hot. I have moved on to the furnace of hell portion of my roadtrip leaving behind the cool beauty of the mountains for the stark red rocks of the desert. After leaving the Great Salt Lake behind, I drove down to Capitol Reef National Park. I stayed at a lovely RV park there called Thousand Lakes. I got to do laundry, I took 2 showers and they even had Internet. It was amazing and very relaxing to get caught up on stuff. I headed out to Capitol Reef the next morning and it was beautiful.
The reef is an uplift and is a monocline meaning it’s only uplifted on one side. It is 100 miles long and is Utah’s newest National Park established only in the 1970’s. What’s amazing is that the Fremont river runs through the park and along this river enterprising pioneers decided to plant orchards so there are huge orchards and big cottonwoods trees and this Eden located amidst the high desert. There’s an old schoolhouse and farmhouse turned museum and I bought a homemade strawberry rhubarb pie and it was divine.
There are a couple of spur roads that go out and I made sure to hit those in the morning because sure enough, it decided to rain on me in a desert where the average rainfall is only 7 inches. What was really neat about this Park is that you are in the bottom looking up. Most canyons you drive around the rim and look down so it was really awesome to be on the floor and really appreciate the size. There was a wall of names inscribed by pioneers and the dates went back to the late 1800’s. Nowadays you get fined if you carve into rocks.

I did a little hike up to the Tanks which are pools of water that somehow remain despite a serious lack of rainfall. They had some odd mutant tadpole things swimming around that looked disgusting. It was approaching noon and the clouds were coming so I headed back to pavement and did one more hike to a natural bridge that rivaled those at Arches National Park.

It provided some good cover during the rain. When I came around the other side of the arch there was a man peeing into the bushes. It’s always scenic!