Utah just never gets old.

So beautiful.

Wow.

I'm always blown away when I come to this state.

Right now, I am in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Heading over to Capitol Reef National Park.

This will be my last of the Mighty Five.

The Utah national parks that are here in this state that I have yet to visit.

I'm really excited.

I'm spending a few days with do some hiking, some sightseeing, some scenic overlooks, and I'm going to be taking you along as well.

I'm Alice Ford and we're back in Northern Norway.

This is the Garden Island, Kauai, Hawaii.

As you guys can see, it is absolutely beautiful down here.

The views are just already stunning.

We are on our way to Antarctica.

So right now we're having a traditional tea here.

Wow.

Capitol Reef National Park sits in the heart of southern Utah, roughly equal distance between the more famous crowds of Zion to the southwest and arches to the northeast.

To get here, you drive through some of the most remote and sparsely populated land in the continental United States, and that remoteness is exactly the point.

The park stretches nearly 100 miles from north to south, but most of it has no paved roads, no cell service, and on many days very few people.

It is, by most measures, the least visited of Utah's Mighty 5 national parks.

And for those who make the journey, that feels less like a shortcoming and more like a secret.

At the center of everything here is the Waterpocket Fold, a massive wrinkle in the Earth's crust that formed around 65 million years ago, when ancient fault lines reactivated and buckled the rock layers into a single, sweeping monocline.

One of the largest exposed on the planet.

One side of the fold was pushed skyward, the other dropped away.

And what remained was this 100 mile long ridge of twisted, layered, impossibly colorful rock that early prospectors called a reef an impassable barrier rising from the desert floor.

The white, rounded sandstone domes crowning the top of that reef reminded early settlers of the Capitol building back in Washington.

And so the name was born Capitol Reef.

In this episode, we're going to explore this park the way it deserves.

Slowly and from multiple angles, we'll drive the legendary Burr Trail through the southern reaches of the Waterpocket Fold.

We'll hike through a dry wash carved by centuries of flash floods.

Venture deep into the remote northern section of the park, all the way to the towering monoliths of the Cathedral Valley.

We'll walk in the footsteps of the Fremont people, who carved their stories into these canyon walls more than a thousand years ago, and the Mormon pioneers who built an entire community here in almost total isolation less than two centuries ago.

Capitol Reef is a park that rewards patience.

The further in you go, the more it reveals.

So let's go explore.

The Bird Trail is a scenic, partially paved road that goes from Boulder in the west to Bullfrog in the east.

The trail was originally built by John Burr, a cattle rancher who needed to travel his herd across the Waterpocket Fold in the late 1800s.

The rudimentary trail he built later became this road, giving us all access to explore the beauty of these national monuments and amazing Technicolor bentonite hillsides.

This area was formed 50 to 70 million years ago and has some incredible geologic formations like sandstone arches, natural bridges, cliffs, and the area is also full of hikes 4x4 drives for high clearance vehicles.

And as the road continues, you'll drive down a series of switchbacks with incredible views.

This road can become treacherous, muddy and impassable at times when raining.

So make sure to check the weather and be prepared.

One of the really interesting things about the Burr trail is that it's one of the only navigable channels through the Waterpocket Fold.

This is actually a wrinkle in the Earth's crust, and if it wasn't for this narrow area, you wouldn't be able to really navigate this at all.

And there's a bunch of different offshoots of roads that you can take off of this as well.

One goes down to Lake Powell.

You can also get to the visitor center from here, but it really just cuts across this lower section of Capitol Reef.

And the views have just been absolutely stunning.

It's a great way to kind of see this lower section of the park.

There's a couple of hikes that you can do, as well as two really great backpacking trips off of this road as well.

All right gang, we are finally on our first hike here.

Spend most of the morning in the car just driving along the Burr Trail.

So beautiful.

Finally out getting some fresh air and basically back around by the visitor center now.

That is highway 24 right below me.

Kind of the main drag through the park.

This trail is just one mile.

It's called the Hickman's Bridge Trail, and it takes you up to a natural bridge.

It's pretty popular as well, so definitely expect to see probably the most amount of people that you'll see in Capitol Reef on these shorter trails adjacent to the visitor center.

There it is.

Hickmans Arch, pretty nice view from here.

This is a little loop trail that takes you around and right back down where you began.

What do you know?

I was I was just down there looking at the natural bridge.

Now we're up here.

There's another trail on your way back to the parking lot.

If you're doing the bridge that actually goes to the Canyon overlook, this is along the way where you can just look right through the arch from a different perspective.

All right.

That was a fun little jaunt up to that natural bridge.

Now I think it's time to head over to the visitor center, make sure I get my Junior Ranger badge, and then head out on one of the most popular scenic drives here in the park.

Continuing past segments natural Bridge I pass through the Fruita Historic District, and one of the first things that I found along the way was the Petroglyph Panel.

This is a really short walk that takes you right up to the rock walls, where Fremont people left their mark on the landscape.

What you're looking at here is one of the most remarkable open air galleries in the American West.

These images weren't made by a single artist on a single day.

They were carved into this rock base over generations by a people archeologists called the Fremont.

The Fremont lived throughout what is now Utah, Colorado, Nevada and Idaho from roughly 300 to 1300 CE, and the Capitol Reef area is one of their most significant strongholds.

They were farmers and hunters, growing corn, beans, and squash in the fertile bottomlands along the river while also following game through these canyons.

They were not the same culture as the Ancestral Puebloans to the south, though the two groups almost certainly knew of each other and likely traded.

What makes the Fremont particularly fascinating, and in some ways mysterious, is how little we still understand about them.

Around 1300, they largely disappeared from the archeological record.

Whether that was driven by prolonged drought, conflict, migration, or some combination of all three.

No one knows for certain, but they left this behind.

These carved figures, called petroglyphs, were made by chipping away the dark desert varnish on the rock service to reveal the lighter stone beneath.

The bighorn sheep you see here were likely symbols of successful hunts or spiritual significance.

The tall, broad shouldered, human like figures, often depicted with elaborate headdresses and jewelry, are thought to represent either important community members or supernatural beings.

Perhaps both.

What we do know is that this panel was not casual.

It was intentional, deliberate, and meaningful.

And the fact that it is survived here on this canyon wall for over a thousand years, completely open to the sky, is something worth pausing to look at.

By the time the Fremont had vanished from these canyons, nearly six centuries would pass before anyone attempted to put down permanent roots here again.

When they finally did, it was a small group of Mormon pioneers who saw something in this remote riverbed valley that most people would have looked right past.

Potential.

The first settler to arrive was a man named Nels Johnson, who homesteaded here in 1880, drawn by the same thing that had sustained the Fremont before him, the Fremont River and the fertile strip of land it carved through an otherwise unforgiving landscape.

Others followed, and the small community that took shape here.

It was called Fruita, named for the fruit trees the settlers planted along the canyon floor.

And those trees changed everything in a place with no roads, no telegraph, and no easy way in or out.

The orchards became the community's lifeline.

Cherries, peaches, apricots, pears and apples.

Nearly 2700 trees in all.

Grew in the rich soil of the river bottom, fed by irrigation channels and settlers dug by hand.

The harvest was traded, preserved and shared among families who were, by any modern measure, completely isolated from the outside world.

At its peak, Fruita had a one room schoolhouse, a community hall, and a handful of homesteads spread across the valley floor.

Life here was hard, quiet, and entirely self-sufficient.

The last permanent resident didn't leave here until 1969.

The same year, humans walked on the moon, which puts into perspective just how different life in this canyon was from the world beyond it.

Today, the National Park Service maintains all 2700 of those original fruit trees, and during harvest season, visitors can actually pick the fruit themselves, a living edible connection to the people who built something extraordinary in one of the most unlikely places on Earth.

This whole area used to be a homestead by several Mormon families that lived here in the 1800s.

And behind me is the Gifford House, which is a place where they actually still sell the harvest.

A lot of the fruit trees that are here on the property and you can get pies there!

they have several different kinds, but if you wait until the end of the day, they're likely to be sold out.

The visitor center is located right off highway 24, and this is exactly where you'll want to stop first, to grab maps of the park, any backcountry permits you need for backpacking or camping, and of course, to grab some souvenirs before you head into the park.

Scenic drive is about eight miles along the paved portion.

This is also where you'll find the main campground for Capitol Reef National Park.

There are actually a lot of places to camp if you are wanting, like a primitive camping or backcountry, but the main places that have RV hookups, potable water and all that kind of stuff are here at the beginning of the Rim Drive.

One thing you have to love about U.S.

national parks is just how accessible they are.

I know that not everyone can get out and hike the trails or head out backpacking, and it's so great that so many of our national parks, especially here in the West, are made for everyone in mind.

Just get in your car and drive and you can see some amazing points of interest.

Overlook scenic vistas.

You don't even have to get out of the car if you can't or you don't want to.

And that's really one of the things that makes our national parks here in America so special, because it gives everybody, regardless of fitness level, age or ability, the chance to get out and see these wildly beautiful landscapes.

The views along this road are just getting better and better.

It's pretty late in the day now, and the sun is just starting to get a little bit lower in the sky, which is giving us these really fantastic colors high up on the canyon walls.

This is where the pavement ends and the dirt begins.

Continuing down this road, you go through Capitol Gorge.

This actually also goes through the Waterpocket Fold, but wrinkle in the Earth's crust that I was talking about earlier.

It's not too long.

This section, it's one of the old wagon roads that they used back in the 1800s.

Cattlemen, Native Americans before then use this area as well.

So if you're up for a little bit more of an adventure, you can definitely check that out.

All right.

I am staying in Torrey, Utah tonight.

This is just ten miles west of the visitor center, and Capitol Reef National Park.

And I got a cute hotel room.

130 bucks for the night.

And, this is what you get for that.

Nice little southwest feel and views.

There is also a restaurant here at this hotel, and there are a couple of hotels here.

I just walked up into this one and said, hey, do you have any rooms available?

And they did.

So even though the campground in the park was full and it seems like it's actually quite busy in Moab and kind of Escalante down here in this region in southern Utah had no problem, finding a place to stay and an affordable place at that.

First stop this morning is to drive part of the Cathedral Valley Loop Trail.

This is a dirt road that starts several miles east of the visitor center and Capitol Reef.

It's actually on BLM land, but it will take you into a couple of sections of Capitol Reef high up in the top side of the park.

Now, much of this road requires high clearance, but about the first half you can do if you have a two wheel drive vehicles.

So I'm in a Toyota Rav4 today.

The lady at the visitor center said it was likely not enough clearance to do the river fording, which is at the end of this loop.

So she recommended that I just go and do kind of the first half and turn around and return.

So the landscape that we are traveling through right now is wild.

I've got to get out of the car here and show you a little bit.

Wow, look at all those striations in the rocks.

The sun is at my back here, so I apologize for the terrible lighting, but I just had to stop because this landscape is so incredible.

This area of Utah used to be under the ocean.

And you can see all those different layers of sediment in this landscape behind me.

So many different colors from the millions of years of Earth's history that you can just come and look at here.

It's pretty amazing.

To understand Capitol Reef, you have to understand the ground beneath your feet, and to understand that you have to go back not hundreds of years, but hundreds of millions of them.

For much of the prehistoric time, this part of North America sat near the equator, covered by shallow seas, vast river deltas, and enormous wind driven sand dunes.

Each of those environments left a layer of limestone from the sea floor, mudstone from the river plains, sandstone from the dunes stacked one on top of another like the pages of an impossibly long book.

By the time dinosaurs disappeared, the rock record here was thousands of feet thick.

Then, around 65 million years ago, everything shifted.

A period of intense geological upheaval called the Laramide orogeny, the same event that built the Rocky Mountains, sent shockwaves through the crust of western North America.

Here, in what would become southern Utah, an ancient fault line deep underground reactivated.

One side of the crust was pushed upward, the other dropped away, and the rock layers above all those thousands of feet of sandstone and limestone and mudstone were bent into a single, continuous fold, running nearly 100 miles from north to south.

Geologists call this kind of bol a monocline, a staircase in the Earth's crust, where the layers tilt sharply in one direction before flattening out again.

The Waterpocket Fold is one of the largest exposed monoclines on the planet.

The name itself comes from what erosion left behind as rain and snowmelt carved into the folded rock.

Over millions of years, they sculpted thousands of small basins and depressions in the harder sandstone layers, natural tanks that collected and held water long after any storm had passed.

In a desert landscape where water main survival.

Those pockets were everywhere.

To the Fremont people who lived here, to the pioneers who followed and to the wild life that still depends on them today.

The fold we are driving through, hiking across and looking at in wonder.

It's not a backdrop, it is the whole story.

All right.

We have made it to the temple of the sun and the moon.

The drive here was just spectacular.

This huge landscape.

Behind the camera is the Cathedral Valley.

It is absolutely monstrous and the colors are fantastic.

So even if you only come this far to see the temple of the sun in the moon, this drive is worth it.

It will take you about half the day to get here, so make sure to plan accordingly.

Also know that pretty much the entire park of Capitol Reef has no cell reception, so if you're coming here, make sure to plan all of your maps, download all the information that you need, and plan out your route before entering the park.

The road goes right up to the bottom of these monuments, so there's no hiking required.

You can just come and experience the majesty of these amazing landscapes.

I've heard it's best to come here at sunrise, but because this is about an hour and a half to two hour drive from the town, you will have to leave incredibly early, especially in the spring when sunrise is around 6:15 in the morning.

This isn't the only temple of the sun in the moon.

There's another one in Mexico that I actually visited several years ago.

Now those ones were built by man, but these ones here are completely natural.

They were named from the previous park superintendent when Capitol Reef became a park, and the towering monoliths rise hundreds of feet up into the air, made of Estrada sandstone and deposited here around 160 million years ago.

Wow, this is so cool.

This is called Glass Mountain.

It is this large outcropping just completely made of what looks like mica.

This might be quartz.

I'm going to look it up and double check for you because I don't know off the top of my head, but it is absolutely beautiful.

After a quick googling back home, I learned that the Glass Mountain is actually made of selenite or gypsum, not mica or quartz, which are both completely different types of rocks.

And it was deposited here by seawater that evaporated around 165 million years ago.

One of the other popular trails, not too far from the visitor center is along the Grand Wash.

And just as you may assume, this trail follows a riverbed, a dry riverbed about four and a half miles through the whole thing.

But one of the things that makes this really popular is that not only is it right off the road, but you can also choose to just do as much or as little as you want, choosing to meander for just a few mere minutes or a few hours.

And there are lots of different habitats throughout this dry streambed.

Also a really great spot to spot a corn sheep.

Now hopefully it goes without saying that you should not try to do this hike if there is a storm in coming or if it's raining.

The summertime is also monsoon season, so if you are visiting this park in the summertime, expect very high temperatures and also expect that places like this are potentially going to be hazardous or inaccessible.

The Park Service also does close some of these trails from time to time to just protect people from themselves.

The walls of this wash are made of sedimentary rock, so it is extremely porous.

And over the years, as the water has come throttling through this channel, it has created all these different holes and indents within the walls.

It's really fascinating to look at.

There's some areas that you can even walk inside, different areas that are just totally smoothed out and rounded like birds made little homes in here, but it's actually just from the forces of the water as it comes through.

This.

For all its geological drama, Capitol Reef has a quieter side, one that reveals itself slowly if you know where to look.

The fruita orchards, so carefully tended by pioneers and park staff alike, have become something of an unintended wildlife sanctuary.

Mule deer move through them at dawn and dusk, with an ease that suggests they've been doing this far longer than any visitor has been watching.

In the fall, when the apples and pears come down, the deer often there before the rangers, unhurried, unbothered and completely at home, high above the canyon walls.

Something far rarer rides the thermals.

The California Condor, North America's largest land bird.

With a wingspan stretching nearly ten feet, it was functionally extinct in the wild by 1987, when the last wild individuals were captured for an emergency breeding program.

Today, thanks to decades of painstaking conservation work, condors soar over southern Utah once again.

Capitol Reef sits within one of their primary ranging areas, and on a clear morning, with the right patients and a good pair of binoculars, you may find yourself looking up at one of these birds that nearly didn't make it, but did.

Down in the canyons, desert bighorn sheep navigate ledges that seem to defy physics, their hubs perfectly adapted to the same Stan zone that stops most hikers cold and out in the wide open country of the Cathedral Valley.

Pronghorn antelope, the fastest land animal in the Western Hemisphere, crossed the flats with a speed that makes the landscape feel suddenly, briefly alive in a completely different way.

Capitol Reef protects not just rocks in history.

It protects all living things that have learned over millennia.

To call this unlikely place home Here are some of the best views of the park.

You'll want to come and check out Panorama Point.

There is a moment walking the short path out to Panorama Point, where the landscape simply opens up no canyon walls, hemming you in no narrow wash to follow, just the full, unobstructed sweep of Capitol Reef laid out in every direction.

And suddenly the scale of everything you've been moving through all day becomes clear at once.

To the east, the Henry Mountains, one of the last mountain ranges to be formally mapped in the continental United States, so remote they didn't appear on official surveys until 1872.

To the west, the high green plateau of the Boulder Mountains, still carrying snow well into spring and directly below the Waterpocket Fold, running away from you to the north and south.

The 100 mile wrinkle in the Earth's crust that you know in your bones is something genuinely rare.

Photographers know this spot.

So do the deer.

At sunset, the Reef catches the last light and holds it, turning from tan to amber to a deep burning red before the color drains away entirely and the stars take over.

And out here, far from any city, the stars are worth staying for.

Just a short distance away, the goose necks of Sulfur Creek offer a completely different kind of perspective.

Far below the canyon ram the creek has spent millions of years cutting tight, looping meanders into the rock, doubling back on itself again and again in a pattern so deliberate it almost looks designed.

From the overlook above, you can trace the full arc of those curves and get a sense in a miniature just how patient water is when given enough time.

This has been such a great short adventure.

I've only had about one night to experience Capitol Reef, and if you're a hiking enthusiast and you want to do some of the really epic hikes here, there are slot canyons.

Wet and dry.

There are places to go canyoneering, there are backpacking routes, and there are so many other beautiful places that I didn't have time to explore here.

I would definitely recommend spending 3 or 4 full days here.

If you want to get a full taste of some of these hikes that you can do in the area.

But if you just want to see some of the highlights, some of the scenic drives, 1 or 2 days should suffice.

Capitol Reef will never be the most visited park in Utah.

The roads are long, the cell service is gone, and the nearest major airport is hours away.

But spend a day here.

Really spend it slowly without rushing to the next thing, and you begin to understand why the people who know this park tend to come back again and again.

There are places in this world that ask something of you that require a little effort, a little patience, a willingness to go farther than is convenient.

Capitol Reef is one of those places, and what it gives back to those who make the journey is something that is genuinely hard to find anywhere else.

Space, silence and stone that remembers everything.