It was late in the afternoon of Monday, February 13, 2023, and Sean’s and my day at Capitol Reef National Park was swiftly concluding, but we had time for a drive along the relatively short scenic drive and one quick hike to see more Hisatsinom petroglyphs deep in Capitol Gorge. It turned out that we got to see the cliffs of the Waterpocket Fold just when the mid-winter late afternoon light was its most gorgeous.
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For roughly one thousand years, from 300 to 1300 CE, the Hisatsinom people lived across what is now Utah. They left behind distinctive pottery and a distinctive style of rork art. Archaeologists call them the Fremont, named after the river that cuts through Capitol Reef National Park.
On Monday afternoon, February 13, 2023, Sean and I got to visit an extraordinary series of Hisatsinom petroglyph panels along the Fremont River in the heart of Canyonlands National Park. This was our first visit to such sacred sites on a trip that would be full of these encounters.
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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.
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In February 2023, Sean and I returned to Moab, Utah, almost exactly a year after we’d first visited. In 2022, we had gone to the storied outdoor adventure town for a long weekend visit to Arches National Park. We had enjoyed the hotel we’d stayed in—The Radcliffe—so much that, while we were checking out in 2022, I had gone ahead and booked us the same lovely room at The Radcliffe for ten days in 2023. That 2022 trip had focused on diminutive Arches, but the 2023 trip would incorporate its massive companion Parks, Canyonlands and Capitol Reef, completing our visits to the National Parks of Utah.
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