Capitol Reef National Park protects almost 242,000 acres of the Colorado Plateau in south central Utah. Franklin Roosevelt originally preserved the dramatic heart of the landscape as a relatively small National Monument in 1937. Lyndon Johnson greatly expanded the Monument’s boundaries in 1968. Then in 1971, Congress upgraded its status to National Park while also fixing its final boundaries to just slightly smaller than Johnson’s.
The centerpiece of the Park is a one-hundred-mile-long ripple in the earth known as the Waterpocket Fold. Since the Waterpocket Fold runs north-south, Capitol Reef National Park is long and narrow. The center of Park activity, the Visitor Center, campground, and scenic drive, are clustered where the Fremont River and Utah State Route 24 slice through the Waterpocket Fold. Otherwise, the Park is fairly remote with large portions requiring high-clearance vehicles.
On Monday, February 13, 2023, Sean and I spent the day at Capitol Reef National Park, one I’ve been excited about since we started this odyssey. We had decided to make the drive from Moab early in our trip because a snowstorm was threatening to move across Utah beginning the following day. We didn’t want to risk not being able to get to Capitol Reef at all.
We woke at 6am, and after packing up and grabbing some breakfast and coffees we were on the road by 7:30am.
The drive from Moab to the Capitol Reef Visitor Center takes not quite 2.5 hours. The Park really is a long way from almost anywhere.
We skirted the Henry Mountains, which we’d seen in the distance west of Canyonlands the previous afternoon. These mountains are apparently so remote that they were the final portion of the Lower 48 surveyed for maps.
Then we headed west from the Henrys through a grey landscape of badlands that looked like it had been melted. Like a reef in an ocean, the Waterpocket Fold of Capitol Reef National Park rose before us.
We reached the Park just before 10am.
Route 24 bisects the Park, and it took us right through the Waterpocket Fold.
At the Visitor Center, we stamped our Passports to Our National Parks and got some brochures and the Park’s black band map.
While we were looking around, we overheard Ranger Angelina telling some other visitors that the road to Cathedral Valley was passable.
Neat!
I definitely had not expected the road to such a remote portion of the Park to be open in winter. With that news, visiting Cathedral Valley shot right to the top of our to do list for the Park. In fact, that’s what we did do next.
We climbed into the Jeep and headed back the way we’d come, east on Route 24.
About twenty minutes later, we turned off the highway and onto Cathedral Road, a rough dirt and hard-packed clay track headed northwest across Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land.
We drove through the lunar landscape of the Morrison Formation, the same layer of Jurassic rock exposed in Dinosaur National Monument’s famous quarry.
Off to the west, we could see the northern extent of the Waterpocket Fold.
Nearer at hand, cows. Because why not strip every last remaining bit of vegetation from the high dessert?
Then we spotted Lower Cathedral Valley and had our first glimpses of the Temples of the Sun and Moon.
We turned down a spur road that took us back into Capitol Reef National Park and right up to the huge formations.
We parked where the road ended in a turnaround at the foot of the Temple of the Moon. It had taken us almost an hour to drive Cathedral Road from Highway 24.
We were the only ones there.
We got out of the Jeep and faced a chill wind. And there was some cloud cover beginning to come in from the southeast.
Far smaller than its companion formation, the Temple of the Moon is 265 feet tall. Sean is shown for scale in the photo above.
The temples are formed from Entrada Sandstone, the same Jurassic-era rock in which the arches of Arches National Park were formed.
It reminded us a lot of the Nativity facade of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The melting effect that Gaudí captured echoes the melting effect of the erosion of the temples.
We walked clockwise around the Temple of the Moon, taking it in from every angle.
The Sun and Moon names have no Indigenous context. Or even Mormon settler context. They were given these names by the Park Service in the mid-1940s.
The Temple of the Sun is much taller than the Temple of the Moon. At 422 feet tall, it is just a hair shorter than the Wrigley Building in Chicago.
Next we circumnavigated the Temple of the Sun. Again, clockwise.
From the base of the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of the Moon looked tiny.
It’s difficult to capture how massive the landscape is. (Again, Sean is shown above for scale.)
Back at the Jeep, we repositioned it to block the wind so that we could sit on the back and eat our lunch.
Then we headed nearby to Glass Mountain.
Glass Mountain is a small formation made of moonstone, or selenite, a crystalline form of gypsum. Gypsum is the same material that forms the sand at White Sands National Park.
The crystals of Glass Mountain are somewhat unusual in size and in the massiveness of the deposit. Glass Mountain formed as a result of groundwater flowing through the Entrada Sandstone. This water carried dissolved gypsum, which started to crystallize, forming what has been called a “gypsum plug.” This plug is now being exposed as the soft Entrada Sandstone erodes away.
Glass Mountain is absolutely nuts. It’s almost the coolest thing ever.
Sean wondered, “How is it still here to be protected in a National Park? How was it not mined or destroyed?”
It’s possible that what we see is only the very top of a much larger selenite deposit. It could be the equivalent of the tip of an iceberg.
After walking clockwise around each of the three formations, we decided it was time to leave this astonishing place. It was getting cloudier, so we preferred to be back on paved roads. Plus it was already after 1pm and there was a lot more of Capitol Reef National Park to see.
Headed southeast back toward the highway, we had some dramatic views of the Henry Mountains.
Right around 2pm, we reached the highway, turned right, and headed west back toward the Waterpocket Fold and the heart of the Park.
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