Best of the Southwest – Canyonlands – Day 13 – Capitol Reef

After two weeks of hot sunny weather we just took it as given that we would need to get on the trail early in order to beat the relentless heat. So we arose with the sun, packed away our camping gear, downed some fruit and power bars, and then hit the road, saying goodbye to the Bentonite Baldlands and hello to Capitol Reef National Park, one of my favorite parks in America.

Our first stop of the day was just a few miles inside the park at the historic Behunin Cabin which is listed on the National Register. The one room stone house measures 13′ x 17′ and Elijah Behunin and his wife and thirteen children lived there in 1883 for only one year before pulling up stakes and moving up-canyon to the nearby town of Fruita. Man, you talk about a tough life.

Capitol Reef is a desert. It only gets about ten inches of rain a year. And most of the rain they do get comes in flash flood bursts. It is a land of extremes and overwhelming beauty.

It was still early and UT 24 was shady and refreshingly cool. We pulled into an empty roadside pullout by a small bridge over a dry wash of boulders in a congregation of cottonwood trees. This was the Grand Wash Trailhead. By hitting the trail before eight we were beating both the sun and the other hikers.

A canyon wren practiced the musical scale as two ravens glided silently overhead like black stealth bombers. Our plan was to hike up the deep narrow canyon a little over two miles, to the trailhead at the head of the canyon off of the Scenic Drive, and then turn around and walk back to our car, a 4.5-mile amble through a world of eroding Jurassic rock encompassing 200 million years of watery upheaval.

Grand Wash is one of the most popular trails in Capitol Reef and it was a rare treat to have it to ourselves. The canyon followed the meander bends of the powerful rivers that had carved the canyon and the left side of the gorge was in blessed shade while the right side was bathed in warm sunlight. When the sun hit the black iron streaks of desert varnish on the white Navajo Sandstone walls they looked like the surreal images in a Juan Miro painting. In some places the Kayenta Sandstone walls were honeycombed with weird waterpockets that looked like big ice cream scoops had been spooned out of the red rock. It was geology gone mad.

Midway up the canyon, a lone desert bighorn sheep stood defiantly on a precarious ledge like a silent sentinel. We stopped to drink some water and a small snake slithered by and then under the red rock where we were sitting. A large, black and white butterfly with a bright red head landed on a boulder to our left. We were hiking through “Animal Kingdom”.

As we got closer to the trailhead at the head of the canyon we started encountering a parade of hikers, many in large groups and making lots of racket. The spell was broken and we picked up the pace. When we came to the end we could hear the sounds of motors as hordes of people came walking across the sandy bench below the car park toward us like zombies and we turned tail and almost ran away. The hike back down-canyon was, as always, anticlimactic. But all in all, our three hour cruise through Grand Wash was a pure delight.

We continued along UT 24, stopping to snap some photos of the Capitol Dome, a colossal white dome of Navajo Sandstone that closely resembled the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

I used to say that Capitol Reef was the hidden gem of National Parks that no one knew about. Well, the world has finally found it. The Visitor Center was like the “parade of mutants” and the tour buses rolled in like clockwork.

They offered a fairly informative fifteen minute film in the auditorium called “Watermark”, and they had some nice exhibits and an okay gift shop. But the place was a total zoo and we made our escape after about forty-five minutes. But before we left, we picked up the free park map and Jimmy bought the brochure entitled “The Scenic Drive of Capitol Reef National Park – Self-Guided Driving Tour” for $2.

We still weren’t ready for another hike, so we decided to check out some of the roadside attractions around Fruita Rural History District, starting with the Jackson U-Pick orchard where we jockeyed with the wild turkeys and deer for some ripe apples that hung from the trees like yellow jewels and littered the ground like sour mash. After picking a small basket, we returned to the front gate, weighed our fruit on a little scale and paid our $5. It was strictly an honor system operation.

Fruita was settled by the legendary Mormon homesteader Nels Johnson who was part of the San Juan Mission team that had been sent to Bluff on the San Juan River that we had visited a few days before. Nels arrived in 1880 and built his one room cabin in what is now the Chestnut Picnic Area, near the largest cottonwood tree I had ever seen. It’s called the Mail Tree because the mailman would put the mail in little wooden boxes that were attached to the gnarly old tree.

Nels realized that his homestead, located at the confluence of the Fremont River and Sulfur Creek, was the perfect spot to grow fruit and nut trees. And as more settlers moved into the area, the valley bottom began blooming with orchards, many of which have survived to the present. According to the Parkies, it is one of the largest orchards in the National Park system with over 3,000 trees!

Our next stop was the petroglyph panel where Native-Americans had been chiseling their dreams since 600 AD. The huge parking lot was mobbed with buses and cars, so we almost turned around. And we probably should have because the panel was rather disappointing due to the fact that the Park Service has built a new boardwalk to limit direct access to the panel. In fact, we were so far away that we could barely make out the drawings and they even had one of those goofy round binoculars like they put on the tops of tall buildings so you could view the rock art from afar. In the old days, the Parkies let you walk right up to the panel and see the glyphs up close, but given the increased visitation and threat of vandalism, they decided to keep everyone at a safe distance.

By now, it was well after noon and we were ready to grab something to eat. But we made one last stop at the Historic Fruita School, a log cabin that was a bit strange because they had a small audio box by the window that was broadcasting the voice of the school teacher instructing her students. We peered through the small window at the bare, one room school and tried to imagine the Mormon children sitting obediently at their desks, learning the alphabet and practicing addition.

We were getting ready to drive the fifteen miles into the town of Torrey to get some lunch when Jimmy noticed in one of the brochures that the Gifford House, near the Mail Tree, sold fresh pies. Who doesn’t like pie?

The historic Gifford House housed a small frontier museum and store. And they had an incredible selection of large and small fruit pies and fresh bread. I got the raspberry/peach pie and Jimmy tried the apple. We walked outside and ate our scrumptious pies at a picnic table in the shade of a spreading cottonwood tree.

SCENIC DRIVE

After ravenously consuming our fruit pies we decided to take the the 10-mile Scenic Drive to Capitol Gorge. We started around two, the hottest part of the day, and stopped at all of the interpretive signs along the way where we learned about: rock formations; the creation of the Waterpocket Fold; the old Oyler Mine where uranium was mined from the yellowish-gray Chinle Formation; Cassidy Arch which was named after the outlaw Butch Cassidy, who supposedly used Capitol Reef for a hideout; the Slickrock Divide that was the high point between two drainage areas; the oddly-shaped hoodoos and pinnacles; the origin of the Scenic Drive which followed the Capitol Gorge Spur Road, the only road through the Waterpocket Fold until 1962; desert bighorn sheep who were reintroduced into the park after being decimated by disease from the domestic sheep; and the Pioneer Register, where the Mormon families recorded their names on the brown canyon walls.

The last three miles of the road were smack dab in the bottom of the drainage and would not be a happy place in a flash flood. There were a few storm clouds building to the west and we had second thoughts about driving our rental car into a potential dead zone. But we figured that the Parkies closely monitored the weather radar and if there was even the slightest chance of a flash flood, they would close off the area.

At the end of the road there was a large parking area for the Capitol Gorge Trail. When we got out of our air-conditioned car it was like stepping into a blast furnace. The temperature gauge read 118 degrees, the hottest it had been yet on our trip. Yeah, buddy!

The one thing good about the heat was that there weren’t a lot of people hiking the canyon. We walked from shade spot to shade spot for about a mile until we came to the Pioneer Register. The route we were following had been used by millennia by humans and they had pecked their strange symbols onto the smooth brown canyon walls. And when the Mormon pioneers came through in the 1800s, they followed the example. Mormon pioneers tagged the walls for several hundred feet and some looked like they had to have been done by someone standing on a ladder because they were so high up on the rock face.

Before heading to our motel at the Capitol Reef Resort, we visited one of my old haunts, the Rim Rock Restaurant & Inn.

When I first visited Capitol Reef back in the early 80’s, the Rimrock was the only place where you could get a hot meal. It was run by some crazy blond Hungarian B-movie star who had been in a lot of cheesy horror films. She was married to the movie mogul Al Adamsen who was killed a few years back by his contractor and buried under the hot tub at his home in Death Valley. Life imitating art, I guess.

The place had undergone a major face lift and was hopping on the Saturday evening of Labor Day weekend. But we managed to get a table on the back patio with stunning views of Capitol Reef to the east. The new owner came by and we talked about the old days. He had actually worked there when the screen crazies owned the joint and he had some wild stories. The dinner was amazing. Jimmy had fresh trout and local asparagus. And they had an excellent selection of scotch, so I had a few wee drams of Balvenie.

After dinner, we checked into our motel at the Capitol Reef Resort, which was right across the street, and then we quickly headed back to the park to catch the evening ranger talk in Capitol Reef’s moonlit amphitheater. The show was about “Slot Canyons”, something we were pretty well-versed in at that point. Ranger Adam did a fine job and told us about lots of fun rope tricks he and his pals had performed dropping into the wildest slot canyons around.

As we climbed the long hill out of Capitol Reef on our way back to the motel, I turned off the headlights and drove by the light of the moon. The light was muted, like the total eclipse the previous month, and it seemed like we were traveling through another space and time. And the heavens and the earth seemed as one.