At the start of the tour
Welcome to Capitol Reef Scenic Drive
Welcome to Capitol Reef National Park. This tour starts at the Fremont petroglyphs on Highway 24, stops at the old Fruita schoolhouse and the visitor center, then follows the paved Scenic Drive south past the orchards and the Gifford farm, to the end of the pavement, where the old road into Capitol Gorge begins. About nine miles in all, with six stops.
First, the big picture. Everything here sits on the Waterpocket Fold, a wrinkle in the Earth's crust nearly a hundred miles long. Somewhere between fifty and seventy million years ago, an ancient fault buried deep underground came back to life, and the rock layers on its west side were lifted thousands of feet higher than those on the east. Erosion has been carving that great step ever since, into cliffs, domes, arches and twisting canyons.
The park's name comes from two old comparisons. Early travelers saw white domes of Navajo Sandstone that reminded them of capitol buildings. And to prospectors who had been to sea, this long wall of rock was a reef: a barrier to travel, like a reef in the ocean.
I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop and another when you get there, and in between, I'll leave you to enjoy the cliffs and the quiet.
Point 1 · At the stop
Petroglyph Panel
This is the Petroglyph Panel. Along these cliffs, people of the Fremont Culture carved and pecked images into the sandstone about a thousand years ago.
The Fremont lived in what is now Utah from about 300 to 1300 of the Common Era. Archeologists named them for the Fremont River canyon, right here, where they were first defined as a distinct culture. Nobody knows what they called themselves. They hunted and gathered, and they also farmed corn, beans and squash along the rivers. They lived in rock shelters and in pit houses dug into the ground and roofed with brush, and they wove tightly made baskets in a style all their own.
Two wooden boardwalks lead along the cliff. From the shorter one, look for large human-like figures with trapezoid-shaped bodies, many wearing headdresses or horns, necklaces or earrings, and for bighorn sheep, lots of them. Along the longer boardwalk the carvings are closer, but harder to see, because a dark patina has formed over them. There are free binoculars on stands, and the longer you look, the more figures appear.
What do they mean? Some students of rock art read them as a kind of writing; others see art. With few exceptions, no one can be sure. Oral traditions connect the Fremont with the Hopi, Zuni and Paiute peoples, and this is also historic Ute country.
Please look, but don't touch. Every carving here is protected by federal law, and these images have already lasted a thousand years.
Point 2 · At the stop
Fruita Schoolhouse
This is the Fruita Schoolhouse, tucked below the Wingate Sandstone cliffs. Elijah Cutler Behunin donated the land in 1896, and he and the other settlers built it themselves. Only eight families lived in the settlement, then called Junction, but they were big families. His alone had thirteen children.
The first teacher was one of them: his daughter Nettie, who began teaching at the age of twelve, in the family's home, before this building existed. Her first class had twenty-two students, and three were her own brothers and sisters. In 1900, at twenty-two, she became the first teacher here for classes approved by the county. She was paid seventy dollars a month. The men who taught got eighty.
The school began with a flat roof covered in dirt; the peaked, shingled roof came around 1912. The students were full of pranks. They hid the teacher's alarm clock in the woodpile, and someone found that a piece of carbide from a lantern, dropped into a capped inkwell, would make it explode and spatter ink across the room.
This was also the town's meeting hall and church. The desks weren't bolted down, so the room could be cleared for dances, elections and box suppers. Classes ended in 1941, when there weren't enough students left, and the Park Service has restored the building to the way it looked in the 1930s.
Look for a rock where students once carved the school's name, and leave it just as you find it.
History, on the way there
On the way: Capitol Reef Visitor Center
Next, we're heading to the visitor center. This park exists largely because of two local men. As early as 1914, Ephraim Pectol and his brother-in-law, Joseph Hickman, set out to protect this country, first as a state park and later as a national monument. They took photographs and wrote stories about what they called Wayne Wonderland, hoping it would bring visitors and jobs the way Zion and Bryce Canyon had.
Then Hickman drowned at Fish Lake, and for years the idea lost its support. His brother-in-law kept at it. Elected to the Utah Legislature, he wrote to the director of the National Park Service, and he spent four days showing a park official around the canyons. In 1935, the two of them settled on a better name: Capitol Reef.
Point 3 · At the stop
Capitol Reef Visitor Center
This is the Capitol Reef visitor center. In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt set aside thirty-seven thousand, seven hundred and eleven acres as Capitol Reef National Monument: a strip running from about two miles north of today's highway to about ten miles south, just past Capitol Gorge, where this tour ends.
For years the monument barely had a staff. In 1943, Charles Kelly, a Salt Lake City man who had spent years exploring southern Utah, was appointed its custodian, without pay. His wife Harriette worked unpaid too. Kelly finally got a civil service job as the first superintendent in 1950, at the age of sixty-two. It was his first federal job.
Visitors came slowly at first. Then the highway was paved through the Fremont River canyon, the old road through Capitol Gorge closed in 1962, and by 1967 nearly a hundred and fifty thousand people a year were coming. This visitor center, the Fruita Campground and staff housing were built for that wave, under the Park Service's Mission 66 program. In 1971, Capitol Reef became a national park.
The paved Scenic Drive begins here and runs seven point nine miles south. It isn't a loop. The park's entrance fee is paid at a self-pay station along the Scenic Drive, just south of the campground.
History, on the way there
On the way: Gifford Homestead
Next, we're heading to the Gifford Homestead, in the heart of the old settlement. Nobody is quite sure who lived here first. It may have been a squatter named Franklin Young, around 1879, but the first landholder on record was Nels Johnson, who planted the first orchards: apples, peaches, pears and plums, walnuts and almonds. The little community where the Fremont River meets Sulphur Creek was called Junction, and its mail was left at a big cottonwood, the Mail Tree, which still stands in the picnic area.
The orchards did so well that by the turn of the century, Junction was known as the Eden of Wayne County, and in 1902 it took a new name: Fruita. It never had more than ten families. Fruit was picked early and hauled by wagon to towns like Richfield and Price. In 1901, the ten miles to Torrey took more than an hour and a half, in the best weather. The first tractor didn't come until World War Two.
The orchards are still here, watered by the same ditches the pioneers dug in the 1880s. The park looks after about nineteen hundred fruit trees, and when fruit is ripe, signs go up inviting you to pick some, and pay for it at a little self-pay stand.
Point 4 · At the stop
Gifford Homestead
This is the Gifford Homestead. Calvin Pendleton built the farmhouse in 1908, along with the barn, the smokehouse and the rock walls near the house and on the slopes above it. The Jorgensen family came next, from 1916 to 1928. Their daughter Nell married Dewey Gifford, and in 1928 her father sold the place to his son-in-law.
The Giffords stayed forty-one years. They raised dairy cows, hogs, sheep, chickens and ducks, grew their own vegetables and fruit, and kept bottled food in the cellar under the front of the house. Water was carried from the Fremont River and used untreated. Electricity reached the house in 1948. Dewey worked on state road crews and later for the Park Service, and in 1954 the Giffords built a small motel for the monument's visitors.
In 1969, Dewey and Nell sold their home and land to the Park Service and moved to Torrey. They were the last residents, and with them, the story of this place as a farming community came to a close. Dewey looked back on it simply. In his words: 'For me, Fruita was paradise.'
Today the house is a museum and store run by the Capitol Reef Natural History Association, with quilts, soap, jams, homemade ice cream and its well-known fruit pies. It opens each year on March fourteenth, Pi Day, and closes in late November. The barn and the pasture are worth a look in any season.
History, on the way there
On the way: Slickrock Divide
Next, we're heading to Slickrock Divide. The Scenic Drive runs along the western face of the reef, and its rock layers stack up like a cake, the oldest at the bottom.
Down low are thin beds of reddish-brown shale, the Moenkopi Formation, laid down about two hundred and twenty-five million years ago in lagoons, mud flats and coastal flood plains. Above them, banded grey and burgundy slopes hold volcanic ash. That's the Chinle Formation, rich in petrified wood. And above it rise the sheer cliffs of Wingate Sandstone, the dunes of an ancient desert turned to stone. The long sweeping lines inside those cliffs, crossing each other at angles, are the old faces of those dunes.
The cliffs stay sheer for a reason. The softer layer underneath wears away faster and undercuts the sandstone, until big slabs break off and fall. Frost, plant roots, gravity and the occasional flash flood do the rest.
Point 5 · At the stop
Slickrock Divide
This is Slickrock Divide. The rise you're on separates two big drainages. Rain that falls on one side runs north into Grand Wash; rain on the other side runs south, into Capitol Gorge.
When rain comes here, it often comes in torrents. Bare rock and thin soil can do little to absorb it or hold it. So the water runs off fast, picking up loose rock and sand that frost, roots and gravity have already worked free, and pours into the washes. Now picture every slope of a whole plateau draining into one narrow gorge at the same time, and you'll understand how a flood here arrives in a flash, as a tumbling, red torrent.
Look around at the bare stone, what people here call slickrock. Even in this desert, water is the main sculptor. Wind plays only a small part. Most of the big canyon cutting probably happened between one and six million years ago, which, by the standards of these rocks, is practically yesterday.
That's the paradox of this park: a dry country, carved almost entirely by water.
History, on the way there
On the way: End of the Scenic Drive (Capitol Gorge road)
Next, we're heading to the end of the paved Scenic Drive, where the old road into Capitol Gorge begins. For nearly eighty years, that road went straight through the gorge and out the other side.
In 1884, the settlers along the river, led by Elijah Cutler Behunin, spent eight days clearing a wagon road through the narrow canyon, on toward Caineville and Hanksville, some thirty-seven miles east of Fruita. They called it the Blue Dugway. It was so rough that these little river towns stayed among the most isolated in America until the middle of the twentieth century. Every flash flood buried it in debris, and the settlers had to dig it out again. Even so, church officials, miners and outlaws all came through.
It stayed a through road until 1962, when Utah Highway 24 was paved through the Fremont River canyon, and the road through the gorge was closed.
Point 6 · At the stop
End of the Scenic Drive (Capitol Gorge road)
This is the end of the paved Scenic Drive. From here a dirt road continues into Capitol Gorge, a narrow, winding passage through the same Wingate Sandstone that forms the great cliffs of the reef's west face. Higher up, the gorge is capped by Navajo Sandstone, more than fourteen hundred feet thick in places, weathered into the white, rounded domes that gave the park the first half of its name. Both sandstones began as desert dunes. The Wingate breaks off in sheer cliffs because softer rock beneath it wears away. The Navajo rests on firmer rock, so it erodes into smooth curves.
When the gorge road is open, a short stroll into the canyon leads to worn Fremont petroglyphs, and farther on is the Pioneer Register, where early travelers recorded their passage on the canyon walls. The road closes after storms, so ask at the visitor center before you try it.
One more thing before you go: stay for the dark. Capitol Reef became an International Dark Sky Park in 2015, and it has some of the best night skies of any national park in the West. Sixteen kinds of bats hunt here after sunset, and nearby Torrey was Utah's first dark sky community.
Ancient farmers, pioneer orchards and a wagon road cut through solid rock all tell the same story: people have always found a way to live alongside this wall of stone. Thank you for taking this tour with me, and enjoy the rest of your time in Capitol Reef.