Highlights:
– Geological wonders
– Historic homestead
– BLM desert camping
By our estimation, this is yet another one of the most underrated parks in the national park system, and one often skipped by visitors to Utah’s other famous parks. Just 2 hours from Bryce Canyon, this park offers totally different, but just as fascinating landscapes and rock formations. We once again arrived in the evening around sunset, and the red rocks were truly glowing with warm, red light as we approached the park. We stopped for some pictures and at the visitor’s center minutes before closing to grab our Junior Ranger booklets before leaving quickly to find our next free campsite. The park is surrounded by Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, which means free, dispersed camping is allowed. We followed a dusty dirt road off the main thoroughfare to a wide open area with an established fire ring and set up camp for the night. While camping in established campgrounds has its luxuries (toilets, for example), there is nothing quite like camping in a wide-open desert with no other souls around. We slept in two different BLM sites during our visit here, and both were some of the most beautiful desert sites we’d slept in on the trip.
Capitol Reef is another relatively small park, so we spent our time exploring all its nooks and crannies. Our absolute favorite part was driving the Notom Bullforg Road, which is rocky and somewhat treacherous, but was still doable in our small Ford Focus to the Burro Wash Trail, a lovely, easy, and secluded slot canyon hike. We had some difficulty finding the trailhead, due to confusing/lack of signage on the roads, so I would definitely recommend downloading this trail on your AllTrails app ahead of time, as there is also no cellular service in this area.
Capitol Reef is unique in many ways, but one that is especially unique is its connection to the historic homestead founded by Mormon Pioneers on the land that now makes up the park. Near the visitor’s center, surrounded by beautiful yellow cottonwood trees, there is a homestead museum where visitors can purchase historic items and even sample pie made from the apple trees still growing in the park! Also not far from the visitor’s center are ancient petroglyphs, or rock etchings, on the sandstone, depicting the people and animals that lived in the valley between 300 and 1300 CE, which are a must-see!
Finally, we really enjoyed the free ranger talk about the park’s geology and genuinely learned a lot, not just about the rock formations in the area or in Utah, but about the geology of the whole country over millions of years. We definitely looked at the rock formations on our trip differently after this talk, and Capitol Reef is a great park to demonstrate the many different geological eras that are discernible in the rocks throughout the country.