{"id":534,"date":"2010-05-06T14:55:42","date_gmt":"2010-05-06T22:55:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/?p=534"},"modified":"2010-05-06T14:56:28","modified_gmt":"2010-05-06T22:56:28","slug":"capitol-reef-national-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/?p=534","title":{"rendered":"Capitol Reef National Park"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The last park that we visited on our trip to Utah was Capitol Reef National Park.\u00a0 Neither Tom or I had heard of it before, so we did a bit of research before hand, and made sure to talk to the rangers when we arrived.\u00a0 We stayed in the park for two nights, and really were able to get a feel for the place.\u00a0 The park is known for to very different things. The first is that it is geogologically interesting.\u00a0\u00a0 The “reef” has nothing to do with oceans or fish, but is actually what is known as the “Waterpocket Fold”, which used to be part of the Colorado plateau. Some very difficult to understand things happened to do with faults and erosion, caused the Waterpocket Fold to be exposed after millions of years, and the result is a beautiful monocline which seems to jut out of the earth.\u00a0 The entirety of the Waterpocket Fold has been protected in Capitol Reef National Park.\u00a0 The creation of the fold is described in way more accurate detail on the Capitol Reef National Park website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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The park also exists to preserve the historical heritage of the area.\u00a0 It was the original home of the Fremont Indians, who left petroglyphs in the sandstone cliffs.\u00a0 Later it was settled by Morman pioneers, who created the town of Fruita.\u00a0 They planted fruit orchards, thus giving the town it’s name.\u00a0 The Fremont River flows through the valley that lies below the upthrust of rock, and this river is what allowed the settlers to survive in the otherwise arid surrounding dessert.\u00a0 More details about the settlement of Fruita can be found here<\/a>. \u00a0\u00a0 One of the homes of the settlers has been preserved as a museum dedicated to showing what pioneer life would have been like for the first settlers of Fruita.\u00a0 Happily, the Gifford House museum also sells homemade pie and locally produced salsas and jams.\u00a0 Yum!<\/p>\n

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We arrived in the park in the afternoon our first day, and spent some time setting up camp, and eating our first of several pies of the visit.\u00a0 We checked out some of the historic buildings which have been preserved by the park service, including the one room school house.\u00a0 As a teacher, I could not imagine having to teach 20 students of all ages in one room, and have all the respect and admiration in the word for those women who did.\u00a0 ::shudder::<\/p>\n

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That evening, we watched the sunset paint the dessert red and orange.\u00a0 I had lots of fun photographing this tree.\u00a0 It was so photogenic!<\/p>\n

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On our second day in the park, we hiked the Rim Overlook Trail, which wound its way up to the top of the monocline feature.\u00a0 We started early in the morning and had cool temperatures and beautiful light. \u00a0 We passed through several different layers of rock as we climbed, even encountering large, black, pitted boulders which were deposited by an ancient volcanic eruption!<\/p>\n

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As the day progressed though, it got much hotter and the trail wants for shade.\u00a0 It is almost completely exposed the entire way.\u00a0 When we reached the top, we were rewarded with expansive views of the entire valley, the mountains beyond and the historic town of Fruita, with its orchards, a few thousand feet below.It probably didn’t get hotter than around 80 degrees F that day, but that’s quite warm for us Seattlelites who haven’t seen 80 degrees since last August!\u00a0 We were hiding under every overhanging rock and scrubby tree we could find when we stopped for water on our way down.<\/p>\n

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Captiol Reef is a beautiful and interesting park, and I am suprised that it is not better known.\u00a0 I would recommend it to anyone making a trip through Utah’s parks to check it out, it is definitely worth the trip!<\/p>\n

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The last park that we visited on our trip to Utah was Capitol Reef National Park.\u00a0 Neither Tom or I had heard of it before,…<\/p>\n

Continue readingCapitol Reef National Park<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hiking","category-travel","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=534"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":571,"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions\/571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}