Capitol Reef NP

We slept through our alarm on Friday morning. I know... who uses an alarm when they camp? But we had a 3-hour drive ahead of us and needed to find a place to stay (on a Friday night to boot). Luckily we only overslept by 20 minutes, so we were still able to head out on time. We made one last quick stop in Moab to pick up a few groceries before hitting the road.

The drive was nice and went by fairly quickly. We arrived at the Capitol Reed park entrance and headed straight for the Fruita campground. I'd read about this particular area and really wanted to see it. Fruita was a 200-acre frontier settlement established in the 1880s and sits in a lush ravine. Some of the old buildings and orchards are still there. We entered the campground and ran into the hosts. They told us there were 2 tent sites left. We managed to grab one and congratulated ourselves on our good luck. We set up our tent and headed out to play. First, we backtracked and went back to the entrance to take our picture by the sign:

See? Had we stopped at the sign first, we would have missed out on the campsite. We drove to the Hickman Bridge trail head and began our first Capitol Reef hike. This trail was only a couple miles. The first quarter-mile was tough.. very steep and hot. But things flattened out and the hike was great. At the end, we stopped at a small river (well, people in Utah may call it a river, but in reality it was a stream) to cool off.

We left the park for a little while and drove to a nearby town. We came into cell range so I gave Owen a call. Loved hearing his voice!

It was late afternoon and we were hungry, so we headed back into the park and ate lunch at the picnic area near the campground. We had about a dozen mule deer there to keep us company while we ate.

After lunch, we drove along the park's 9-mile Scenic Drive. The last couple miles were unpaved, meaning we looked stupid in our Chrysler 300. Whatever. We parked at the Capitol Gorge trailhead and began our next hike. The trail led us through a gorge that actually used to be a roadway used by pioneers. In fact, in one area you can see where hundreds of them carved their names into the stone. We also found some petroglyphs in the area.

We were up for a little rock scrambling so we found the trailhead for The Tanks, which are a series of holes in the rock that collect water, and started climbing. We followed the cairns (stacks of rocks that mark the trail) and after a short while we found the water holes we'd been searching for. Also saw a couple of small frogs, which was unexpected.

We climbed back down and hiked back to the car. The sun was beginning to set and we were tired. Before it was completely dark, we drove to an area where we knew we'd see some more petroglyphs. Spent a little time checking them out, then we drove back to camp, had dinner, and went to bed. Once again, we slept well after a long day of playing hard.