What's the Deal with Capitol Reef?

There are over 390 units in the National Park system.  Many parks are places of great natural beauty, while others are preserved historical landmarks or the sites of important points in history.  Most parks make sense, meaning that their preservation needs little in the way of explanation to convince people of why they have been set aside.  Sometimes parks require a bit more explanation, if only out of wonder as to why they are so important.  Cuyahoga Valley National Park, for example, does not immediately come to mind when "National Park" is mentioned.  The place lacks the obvious grandeur of the western parks or the more scaled down eastern ones such as Shenandoah or Acadia.  Even out west, though, sheer cliffs and interesting geological formations can get commonplace, and one can wonder, for example, why a place like Capitol Reef National Park could get such a lofty designation.

The defining feature of the park is a 100 mile long escarpment type geologic formation known as a monocline, named the Waterpocket Fold.  In several places, water has carved canyons through the fold, the largest of which is the canyon cut by the Fremont River.  Now, as in the past, the monocline served as a transportation barrier, a difficult ridge between areas of relatively smooth terrain.  To the first Mormon settlers in the area, such an obstacle was reminiscent of a reef.  A dome shaped formation within the ridge reminded them of a capitol dome, hence the combined name.

Not a bad description, really.  From a distance in the west the dome looks a bit more spherical, but the strong morning sun disagreed with my getting any decent shots of the thing from such a perspective.  As the park was somewhat of a "see this on the way" sort of thing, I did not get a good shot of the line of the ridge which would illustrate the reef aspect; that had been passed under darkness the previous night and there was not enough time to backtrack far enough for a good shot.  A definite planned excuse to return!

Anyway, where is this thing?  Well, it is a bit out of the way of "civilization" in general, which is probably why it does not receive the same level of attention or visitors as nearby parks such as Arches or Bryce Canyon.  I only went myself because it was it was on a route that would also go to Bryce, and, well, because it has the national park designation.

Looking at things a bit closer, one can see what an obvious "reef" this does make.

You can easily make out the ridges within the teal circle.  Just to the north lies a similar formation, which I have circled in red, called the San Rafael Swell.

Now, about those canyons that made passage through the area possible... Within the Fremont river canyon conditions are rather lush compared to the rest of the lower elevations in the region.  First, take a look at the otherwise lovely desert landscape just outside of the canyon.

And then inside.  If not for the context of this post, you could not imagine this being in a desert canyon.  Even in person, the riparian forest is dense enough to obscure the canyon walls in some places.

And yet the walls retain their grand imposing scale.  In a North American version of the contrast seen between the Nile and the Sahara, one can see the lovely green of Fremont Cottonwoods standing out against brilliantly patterned canyon rock.

To Paiutes and their ancestors, the vegetated canyon floor was an oasis of water and game. The earliest inhabitants of the area even left us a record of their life in some well-preserved petroglyphs:

For Mormon and other Euro-American settlers of the region, it was a pleasant and convenient place to pass through the reef.  Some of them even stayed, and what remains of the tiny settlement of Fruita, Utah, is one of the showcased features of this park.

Then there are the orchards, which gave Fruita its name.  As fellow nature blogger Steven Mullen points out,  a fruit orchard with cliffs in the background is not something you see every day.

Now of course, no one is actually looking at that lovely orchard in front of the cliffs.  I agree, that is a rather nice sign, even if it did spoil the view.  Oh, yes, and there is that mule deer running across Utah 24, sure.  Needless to say, where there is water, shade, and plenty of green to feast upon, there will be plenty of animals around as well.  There were tons of mule deer.

OK, so I took a shot of that one twice (very photogenic deer), but there were about four or five different deer in various points throughout the canyon.  There were also a lot of lizards, like this one here:

Try looking in the middle of the picture if it eludes you.  Amazing what camera zooms can do to keep animals safely to themselves, but allow us to get wonderful shots of them at the same time.

Historical and biological sights aside, there are also those absolutely wonderful sheer cliffs and walls that contain this whole drama.

Even in the darkness, these walls made the scale of their presence clear, and driving Utah 24 at night is perhaps almost as incredible as it is during the day.  Amazingly, it was the little Fremont river that carved out this canyon.

I am told that in times of spring rains and melts (the rim is over 1,000 feet above the floor in some places, so there tends to be snow in the winter), water descends in lovely waterfalls all over the place.  By mid June, however, there was only one trickle.

Water has an amazing power to shape the earth, and this canyon is a monument to the potential of a river.

And the amazing geological features this park has do not stop there.  As is the case of much of the arid west, the rock is bare and exposed, not hidden by soils, vegetation, or worn down by the more frequent rains of the east.  Layers of rock sit upon one another, thrust up from below.

So what?  There are other more significant historical sites out there.  There are plenty of far more dramatic canyons around.  Mule deer and Fremont Cottonwoods range throughout the west.  "Naked geology" is plentiful, especially in grander locales like Death Valley or the Grand Canyon.  There are other rivers that flow through the arid west to make an abundant oasis.  True.  Here, however, they are all together and the variety is further enhanced by the contrasting scale of minute and grand elements all merged into a lovely whole.

The park is a delightful surprise, to say the least.  Even if one comes here only for the park proper, and just the canyon drive at that, the immediately neighboring scenery does not disappoint either.  The land to the west of the fold is open, rugged, and colorful.

I noted that the land was something of a desert, which is only a half truth.  While it shares much in common with the nearby high desert of the rest of the Colorado Plateau, the land also rests at just about 5,000 feet above sea level, where the pinyons and junipers start to show up.  In areas of barren red rock where sagebrush will not grow so thickly, they stand out rather well.

Not a bad place at all.  Shameless endorsement: Just west of the park on Utah 24 is Torrey, a small town.  There is a rather convenient Best Western hotel there, and if you pay an extra 10 dollars for your room, you get a lovely view of the red rocks on the western edge of the Waterpocket Fold.

All in all, a different sort of area and a lesser known park that combines the best of many features of the west.

And that was only from the small park drive, and half of it at that...