🍑 Capitol Reef: what you will find there

A reef nowhere near the sea

The park's name is confusing twice over, and both halves have a reason. Reef was not a word sailors used here but drovers and teamsters: a reef was anything long and rocky that could not be crossed and had to be driven around. And this one was particularly awkward - it runs a hundred and sixty kilometres from Thousand Lake Mountain down to Lake Powell, and it is a vast wrinkle in the earth's crust that geologists call the Waterpocket Fold. Rock layers that lie flat everywhere else break here and dip to the east like a rug somebody has tripped over. It is the largest formation of its kind in North America.

And Capitol? The white Navajo sandstone weathers into rounded domes, and to some of the first visitors they looked like the dome of the Capitol in Washington. It should be added that this took a little imagination.

The orchard where you may eat

Mormon families came to this parched hole in the late 1870s and did something that still looks unbelievable: they dug ditches from the Fremont River, led the water onto the silt terraces and planted fruit trees. The settlement was called Junction at first. In 1902 it was renamed Fruita, because fruit sounded more saleable than a crossroads - and it was, honestly, the only thing here that earned money.

There were never more than ten families at a time. They had no church and met in the schoolhouse, electricity reached the place only in 1948, and the last family left in 1969. All the same, this was called the paradise of Wayne County.

The orchards remained and the park keeps them as a historic landscape - over 1,900 mature trees, one of the largest historic orchards in an American national park. Varieties grow here that you cannot buy in a shop because nobody grows them any more: forgotten peaches and apples. There is a rule that looks like a trap and is not: what you eat in the orchard is free. What you carry out you weigh and pay for at a self-service box with a price list. You may pick only in an orchard with a sign at the gate saying it is open - and which one that is changes from week to week.

A road along the canyon floor

When you walk through Capitol Gorge today, you are walking on an old road. From 1884 this was the only through route east out of Fruita, and it ran literally up the bed - over sand and boulders, between walls that in places close to a few metres. Every storm rearranged it and somebody had to dig it out again. The people who drove through have signed the walls: the Pioneer Register, names carved into the sandstone from the 1870s onwards.

It ended in 1962, when Highway 24 opened to the north. A whole day's drive became a few minutes, and a main road became a hiking trail.

Earlier still, Butch Cassidy hid here. Grand Wash, the next canyon over, has one advantage an outlaw appreciates: you ride in at one end and come out at the other. The arch high above the bed is still called Cassidy Arch.

The people who were here first

Long before the orchard keepers this was the country of the Fremont culture, roughly from AD 300 to 1300. It is named after the Fremont River - it was here that archaeologists first described it as a culture of its own, distinct from the Puebloans to the south. They grew corn, beans and squash, lived in pit houses dug into the ground, and left behind clay figurines and petroglyphs: figures with trapezoid bodies, headdresses and earrings, and herds of bighorn sheep. The panel on Highway 24 is one of the best places to see them, from a wooden boardwalk.

Around 1300 they vanished from the whole region. Most likely they dispersed among other groups and merged with them; nobody knows for certain. The Hopi call them Hisatsinom, the People of Long Ago.

Practical, but important

From July to September the monsoon arrives, and with it flash floods. Canyons like Grand Wash and Capitol Gorge are drainpipes for tens of square kilometres of bare rock that soaks up nothing. Half an inch of rain somewhere beyond the horizon is enough to send a wall of water down the bed. There is no climbing out of the narrows. When clouds pile up over the plateau, simply do not go there that day - and listen to the rangers, who close the canyons when storms are about.

Of Utah's famous five, this park has the fewest visitors, and that is its chief advantage: at the hour when Arches has a queue for the car park, here you will park. And buy a pie while you are at it.