National Parks and Recreation

Not to give any spoilers away too early, but I think it’s worth stating this from the top: Capitol Reef National Park ended up being my favorite of the Utah Mighty Five. And I’m just as surprised as you are.

Capitol Reef already feels like you’re driving into another world. Add to this the fact that it was New Year’s Eve and a blizzard was bearing down on Southern Utah, and it made for a very eerie, deserted experience.

We zoomed straight to the visitor center to get there before they closed for the holiday and get our passport stamps and check out some of the exhibits. We only saw one other person there and he had just popped in to ask the best way to get to Bryce Canyon while avoiding the snowstorm.

The exhibits were very interesting at this visitor center and did a great job teaching all about the different landscapes in Southern Utah. And I learned just why I was going to love this park so much. See, I love the water and am obsessed with the ocean, and Capitol Reef feels like one giant underwater grotto. Because it basically was. This 100-mile stretch of south-central Utah that encompasses Capitol Reef is called the Waterpocket Fold, a warped section of the Earth’s crust that has indeed been underwater on two different occasions over the last tens of millions of years.

Like I said, we were pretty limited on time and honestly just pretty desperate to get to our warm hotel room and start drying out all our stuff, but I knew our time would be limited in the park due to the impending storm, so we set out to do as much as we could.

Let me backup. Capitol Reef is split into three districts: Cathedral Valley to the North, the Waterpocket District to the South, and the Fruita district by the visitor center. On this trip we stuck to the main Fruita District, as the other two are not easily accessible during the winter when road conditions aren’t ideal. The Northern and Southern parts of the park are only accessed by unpaved roads. We will definitely hit up Cathedral Valley when we come back. The pictures look unreal. Monument Valley-esque.

Fruita has all the historical exhibits, the campground, and the start of the scenic drive. If you’re into history, there’s a lot of cool stuff to check out. This area has been inhabited for thousands of years. Native Americans, dating back to the year 1,000, created incredible irrigations systems for the farmland that have kept the land ripe and verdant to this day. After the Civil War, the area became settled by the Mormons on their missions West. They didn’t stay in the area long though because the land could really only sustain about ten families. And by the mid-1920s, several different preservation efforts had begun to preserve the beautiful land in the surrounding area, with FDR officially declaring it a National Monument in 1937.

You can visit this farmland and explore the old schoolhouse and some farmhouses that still stand today, but since I’m not a huge history buff and we were short on time, we just drove through slowly and checked it out from our car.

We took it all the way to the end and marveled at the giant walls of exposed rock before turning onto the Capitol Gorge Road. And I was very pleased that our tiny, piece of crap rental car made it all the way to the end of this tiny unpaved road. There were only a few sketchy parts; I’ve done worse in a rental car.

This canyon drive was one of my favorite parts of the entire park.

You could also see some really cool landmarks from this road. Like the aptly named Golden Temple above.

And the Capitol Dome above. The park was named after these domed structures that look like the ones you find on capitol buildings.

When you get to the end of the Capitol Gorge Road, you can keep on hiking into the gorge and explore some really cool old carvings and hike up to the base of the Golden Throne and other neat rocks. We didn’t really have the time to do this, but also a few rain clouds were starting to roll in and you really don’t want to be in a desert gorge or canyon during a rainstorm. Flash floods are very scary. So we decided to head on out and get to our warm, dry hotel room.

But not before a quick stop at Panorama Point for sunset.

Honestly I should’ve taken some pictures of our hotel set up that night. After quickly taking some nice, hot showers to clean and warm ourselves up, the tent and sleeping bag drying out mission began. I had the tent and rain fly hung up in the shower, our sleeping bags were hung up in the closet, our sleeping pads were spread out in the car to air out, and the rest of our soaking wet clothes and bags were strewn across the floor and the heater. It was quite comical. But it worked! Everything was perfectly dry by the morning. So we spent a wonderful evening, getting to sleep in a real bed again, watching some college football, and at least making it to midnight on the East Coast and watching the ball drop (I did not make it to midnight local time, but alas.) Happy 2023 everyone!

The next morning we got up bright and early to explore as much of the park as possible before the blizzard really started. We needed to be on our way by noon if we wanted to get to our next stop outside of Bryce Canyon before the snow really started. And there were two hikes I wanted to get in: Cassidy Arch and Hickman Bridge. But as soon as we pulled back into the park, it started raining.

I was feeling pretty down and bummed out at this point. I had LOVED what we saw of Capitol Reef the day before and now I wasn’t going to be able to explore more of it. On top of how upset I already was that we weren’t going to be able to do the scenic drive down Utah Route 12 because of the blizzard. But James, as always, kept a level head and implored us to at least do what we could.

So we pulled up our hoods and headed over to the petroglyphs area in the rain. Some of these carvings are over 1,000 years old!

I loved these little guys. Unfortunately you can’t go all the way up to the glyphs anymore because people suck and were vandalizing them, and also there was a pretty significant rock fall that destroyed a lot of the glyphs, seen above.

I also really liked the robot guy above. There were plenty more along this long boardwalk. I’d highly recommend bringing binoculars. And pay attention! James and I walked like 100 feet down the boardwalk before realizing that there were petroglyphs the entire way and not just at the end. Duh.

At this point it was still raining and we didn’t have service in the park to tell us if it was going to stop anytime soon. The clock was also ticking on the snow so I knew we’d only have time for one more thing, unless we wanted to just completely bail and start heading out (my grumpy suggestion because I was being a grump). But James said we should do one more hike, even if we got wet, we had another hotel for the next night because we couldn’t camp out in the blizzard like we had initially intended.

I was more excited for the Cassidy Arch hike, but I knew it entailed a long drive down a dirt road (not ideal in the rain) and we were already basically right next to the Hickman Bridge Trail. So Hickman Bridge it was! And you know the drill…we’ll be back for you Cassidy Arch!

I was obsessed with these little black moon rocks as I called them. I’m sure I could do even an ounce of googling and figure out what they actually are, but they’re moon rocks to me!

And they were everywhere on this trail! But I only saw them in this one part of the entire park. Science, man.

Back to Hickman Bridge! It’s a pretty easy 1.7 mile out and back trail and I absolutely LOVED it. I have gone back and forth since we got back on if I want to declare this my favorite hike of the entire trip. I still don’t know where I land, but do not sleep on this trail! Once you get past the black moon rocks section, you enter the grotto section.

You cannot convince me this isn’t directly out of the Little Mermaid.

And with the water dripping down from the rain…it was magical!

And finally a natural land bridge I could climb on top of!

And then something even more magical happened…

The rain stopped and the sun came out!! Moral of the story: always always always just do the damn hike!

We reluctantly said goodbye to the grotto and continued on. And honestly, you just kind of come around a corner and there’s the bridge!

I was not expecting it to be so big. Definitely too big for me to climb on top of. C’est la vie.

I feel like these pictures don’t do it justice, but you can kind of get an idea of how tall it is in the below picture.

Look how little James is in comparison!

We had the entire trail to ourselves! There was only one point when we heard people in the distance, presumably hiking towards us, but we never saw another soul. It really felt like nature just put on this whole private show just for us.

We hung out for a bit crawling under the bridge and yelling various things into the echo chamber before finally moving on. Little did I know that my favorite view on the trail was still yet to come!

I mean…come on!

And look at that sunshine! What blizzard?? (narrator: the blizzard was very much still coming)

Just absolutely magical. This view is a just a little bit off the trail after you cross under the bridge and before you loop back around to the main trail (if you’re going counterclockwise). Keep your head on a swivel and DO NOT miss it!

Noon was fast approaching though so it was time for us to head back to the car. We made the return hike at lightning speed.

We enjoyed some things from the beginning of the trail that we had kind of missed because of the rain.

And then it was back in the car and off to Bryce Canyon!

Quick interjection: not sure if this will be funny to anyone else or if James and I were just on a hiking high, but I had been singing Under the Sea through most of this hike (for obvious reasons) so I decided to put it on as soon as we got back into the car. And because service was nonexistent here, this is how the GPS showed up:

And we could not stop laughing at how ironic that picture was with the song title there. We were literally under the sea! And like, if it had been 10 million years prior, would actually have been! It doesn’t take much.

So anyhoo, we took off in our boat–I mean, rental car–and gave up on my dream of doing Utah Route 12 on this trip.

I don’t remember if I discussed this before, but one of the things I was most excited for on this trip was the drive from Capitol Reef to Bryce Canyon. It follows scenic route 12, which is repeatedly number 1 on lists of the most scenic drives in the US! I was so excited to do it and to stop at some hikes in Grand Staircase-Escalante, a beautiful, HUGE national monument that spans pretty much all of Southern Utah that isn’t already a national park. But alas, it is a twisty, curvy road that climbs up and down thousands of feet of elevation and it is just not where you want to be during a snowstorm. And since the storm was coming from the south, I knew that most of the road was already being impacted. So I made the tough decision to be responsible and drive up and around the storm instead. I just had to keep reminding myself that I wouldn’t be able to see the views anyway and in the grand scheme of things, we had really lucked out with weather so far. I wasn’t going to let one instance of bad timing ruin my trip (okay, so I did try to let it ruin my trip, but we were about to have one of the most magical days in Bryce Canyon that made it all okay).

We’ll be back to drive it soon, we’ll be back to drive it soon, we’ll be back to drive it soon!

The drive up and around the storm was also pretty beautiful. We had pretty limited visibility at the higher elevations because of the weather, but there were some very interesting landscapes down in the valley that I had never seen/really didn’t look like they belonged amid all the red rocks of the surrounding national parks. I would’ve taken some pictures, but I was death gripping the wheel of the car because conditions were not ideal. And I can barely trust James to take pictures standing still, let alone from a moving vehicle. Don’t tell him I said that.

So that was Capitol Reef National Park! Genuinely my favorite of the entire trip. Yes, even better than Zion to me. It felt like a park that was made just for me with all the things that I specifically love. I cannot WAIT to come back and explore even more. And drive that damn scenic road!!!

Bye for now!