Capitol Reef National Park

4/15/09
Capitol Reef was established, first as a National Monument and later as a National Park, to protect a geologic phenomenon known as the Waterpocket Fold, a 100-mile long slab of earth that lifts 14 layers of sedimentary rock out of the ground and tilts them to an angle. The Colorado Plateau is often described as a layer cake, layer upon layer of sedimentary rock piled more or less flat on top of one another. The Grand Canyon famously cuts deeply into the cake, exposing many of its layers. The Waterpocket Fold deploys a different strategy: it lifts the layers up and tilts them to reveal more than is usually visible in one shot.

The Waterpocket Fold looks to me like an enormous ship, but early explorers called it a reef because it blocked the way, and boy did it. No paved road cut through the Waterpocket Fold until 1962. To geologists, it is an enormous monocline, a common type of folding earth which along with its partners anticline and syncline has eluded my grasp ever since I first tackled geology. My incomprehension would survive exposure even to this great fold, though the exposures themselves would modestly advance my nascent understanding of the sedimentary layers of the Colorado Plateau.

 In contrast to the harsh impregnable features of the Waterpocket Fold, the campground at Capitol Reef was a serene pocket of green. A lightly treed lawn, some horses grazing about, cultivated orchids, rustic fences, remnants of farm equipment, rustic fences. This was once the Mormon settlement of Fruita, and the area is still known by that name.

Mormons first settled here at the confluence of Sulphur Creek and the Fremont River in the late 1880s. It was one of several Mormon settlements, cast far from any civilization, along the Fremont River, where the homesteaders found the soil and weather conducive for fruit orchards. Fruita remained one of the more isolated communities in the US well into the twentieth century, thanks largely to the transportation impediment posed by the Waterpocket Fold.

Isolation had its appeal, but residents saw the income their neighbors to the west were deriving from Zion and Bryce National Parks, and they induced Franklin Roosevelt to establish Capitol Reef National Monument in 1937. The CCC worked on improvements for a year or two, but the park service mostly ignored the place until after the war, and the area remained remote until well after that. Pavement didn’t reach Fruita until 1952, and not until 1962 did the state push the highway down the Fremont River through the Waterpocket Fold to connect the area to points east with a real road. All the while the homesteaders of Fruita went about their business, tending to their orchards and providing rudimentary accommodations for the few tourists who got this far. Finally the park service began buying them out; most sold willingly. The last Fruita homesteader sold his land to the government in 1969, two years before Congress promoted the national monument to a greatly expanded national park.

The park service has preserved this homestead as a Rural Historic Landscape, featuring a restored schoolhouse, a blacksmith shop, and a small museum selling fresh homemade bread and jam. National park staff maintains the orchards, its 3100 fruit trees making for the largest historic orchards in the National Park System, and who‘d have thought there be one, much less an entire category. Visitors strolling the park can freely graze ripe fruit, and in harvest season they can pay to pack some for the road.
 
Fruita’s orchards were not in bloom when I was there. Nothing was in bloom. The forecast called for snow. The day remained sunny until mid-afternoon when a thick cloud cover moved in just as I set off on an exploratory hike up the formidable wall of rock formations flanking the campground. I passed an almost maroon layer of carved soft pinnacles called the Moenkopi Formation, and then ascended a hundred vertical feet or so of the Chinle Formation, a very unusual layer of rock and one I would contemplate a bit the next day. Above the Chinle rose the massive Wingate Sandstone Formation, steep towers of alternately pink and golden rock said to be stronger than Navajo Sandstone. Moenkopi, Chinle and Wingate - all new to me - are older formations than the now familiar Navajo Sandstone and the Kayenta Formation, just older as these things go, and here in Capitol Reef the Kayenta Formation sits atop the Wingate cliffs, forming rocky slopes that support the Navajo Sandstone domes towering above it all.

At the top of the slope I passed through portals of Wingate towers and entered a narrow defile known as Cohab Canyon. After the glamour of Zion, Kodachrome, and Calf Creek Canyon, Cohab Canyon was an aesthetic letdown. Maybe it was just the dim light from gray skies, but the element of fantasy I had been reveling in was missing. So I buckled down and concentrated on smaller scale features of interest, mostly the creatively erosive character of the rock. Towers straight and strong; cliffs riddled with holes; close-ups of smooth, wavy orange; swirly indents I dubbed ear holes; dramatic pedestals.

At some point according to trail guide I moved from the Wingate Formation into the Kayenta Formation, which means I was heading up strata even though I was walking down canyon. This is not terribly unusual in most places but is an anomaly on the Colorado Plateau where layers are primarily stacked flat, an anomaly caused by the tilting of the Waterpocket Fold.

Vistas began opening to the creamy towers and domes of the overlying Navajo Sandstone. Capitol Dome, reminiscent of the DC building and the namesake for the park. Pectols Pyramid, named after the local legislature most responsible for establishing a national monument, were the two most prominent. At canyon’s end I crossed the narrow highway to a short stretch of trail along the Fremont River, cutting its canyon through the Capitol Reef.



Pectols Pyramid



Capitol Dome



Fremont River

The final leg of my hike was uphill over Kayenta slickrock to my destination, Hickman Bridge. I’d seen Kayenta on the slopes of Zion and along Calf Creek but this was the first time I’d be hiking into it. It makes for a rugged landscape of slickrock ledges, broken rock, collapsed ledges, patches of pulverized soil holding small pines. Strewn about this pink and cream formation were thousands of large black rocks, smoothly rounded. I recognized them as volcanic and anomalous and read they were indeed erratics, washed down in a huge mudflow from Boulder Mountain 30 miles away. I had a hard time envisioning a volcanic peak in this landscape and certainly hadn’t yet seen any such mountain, but they were out there, somewhere, obscured by clouds.
 

Finally, Hickman Bridge, one of the park’s famous attractions, also named after an early local advocate for national protection. It’s enormous - 125 feet tall and 133 feet between its thick abutments. It looks sturdy as a bridge, but geologists (or maybe some geologists) say it’s not a bridge but an arch. A natural bridge is formed when over time flowing water pokes an opening through a wall of rock. An arch is generally formed when seepage creates an alcove in a relatively thin slab of rock and weather and gravity eventually cause the alcove rock to crumble and fall, leaving the outline of the arch. These are definitions and who am I to quibble? I will say that Hickman Bridge looked a lot more like the features I’d later see at Natural Bridges National Monument than like the arches I’d see at my next stop, Arches National Park.


Hickman Bridge

While green and pleasant the campground sites were packed in tight, so I had to simulate privacy. Luckily I had an edge site, so one side was safe. I sat in the morning and looked out at the not-yet blooming fruit trees, my tent blocking one side, my car not quite blocking, my back to the road. A sprinkler system had run all night and was still at it. Horses grazed in the fields. Stormy skies kept looking stormier, and though it seemed too warm to snow, the forecast for the rest of the week was awful. I went to the Visitors Center but found both the movie and the ranger’s geology presentation frustratingly inadequate, so I set off on the scenic drive to ponder the Waterpocket Fold.

This park’s setup is a bit unusual. Highway 24 cuts through the heart of the park, so the park service can’t charge admission for the Visitors Center, the picnic area, the orchards, or several of the trailheads. The park does charge admission to drive along the scenic road though. This road was once the main road through the park, cutting through the Waterpocket Fold through something called Capitol Gorge, a route subject to flash floods and impassable mud. Contemporary signs continue to warn drivers that side roads turn to gumbo when wet, and that hikes into the slot canyons entail the risk of flash flood. In this weather I couldn’t drive off the main road or hike into the canyons if I chose to remain prudent, and I chose to remain prudent. People were doing both and likely they understood the weather better than me, but I mostly puttered near enough my car to make a break for it, taking pictures of the formations against the stormy clouds and hoping I’d get either a crazy storm to justify my caution or some brilliant sun break against blackened skies. I got neither and instead got depressed.

 
Later that evening I did hike, through Fruita fields and orchards and up along the Fremont River trail, climbing up to look down over the river, a thin band engulfed by thick clumps of riparian vegetation, most of it still in spare winter color. Above the vegetation rose a layer of the red-brick Moenkopi, the same rock I was passing along the trail. But what was most fascinating was the ground cover above, a glowing pale-green surface that could have been soil or could have been some mossy foliage, except the cover itself was punctuated with scattered patches of small brush. It was perplexing and strange, but also wonderful.

My working hypothesis is that it was sedimentation washed down upon the Moenkopi slopes from the Chinle Formation. The Chinle Formation would become a recurrent character in my travels. It appears in various forms and has various members, but it tends to bring a lot of color to places and also a bit of magic, maybe some sinister magic. It contains petrified wood. It contains uranium. And if the ghastly glowing green did not actually reflect the presence of uranium, it certainly made for me a compelling metaphor.

The top of the hike offered a pretty terrific overview of the Capitol Reef portion of the Waterpocket Fold. According to Ron Adkison I was looking at five rock formations laid out from bottom to top: “the red Moenkopi, the gray, green, and maroon Chinle, the towering orange-red cliffs of the Wingate, the wooded benches of the Kayenta, and finally the whitish cliffs and domes of the Navajo.” And there they were.

According to the trail brochure I would also see white clouds “against a field of cobalt blue sky”, but what I got was mostly overcast and threatening. I waited for a while in hopes of some nice low light but it didn’t seem to be coming so I gave up. Too soon! Halfway down the trail the sun poked out and lit the place up in early evening glory. A real photographer would have raced back to the top - it wasn’t that far - but I went back to my campsite to eat and read, by-and-large resisting the temptation to jump around trying to capture the beautiful light.

The storm rallied for good just before sunset and I left Capitol Reef the next morning, sooner than I’d wished. I couldn’t risk hiking the canyons and I saw no sense in doing a big view hike if I wasn’t going to see anything. I hoped I would catch the park under better conditions on my way back to Bryce later in the spring.