Capitol Reef National Park & History

The town nearest Capitol Reef is Torrey, Utah, which lies eight miles west of the visitor’s center on Highway 24. Torrey is very small, but has several motels and restaurants. The park itself has a large campground, but it often fills by early afternoon during busy summer weekends. Overnight camping within the park requires a permit from the rangers at the visitor’s center.

Activities in the park include hiking, horseback riding, and a driving tour. Mountain biking is prohibited in the park, but many trails just outside the park exist.

Capitol Reef encompasses the Waterpocket Fold, a wrinkle in the earth’s crust that is 65 million years old. In this fold, newer and older layers of earth folded over each other in an S-shape. This wrinkle, probably caused by the same colliding continental plates that created the Rocky Mountains, has weathered and eroded over millennia to expose layers of rock and fossils. The park is filled with brilliantly colored sandstone cliffs, gleaming white domes, and contrasting layers of stone and earth.

Capitol Reef and vicinity
Aerial view of Waterpocket FoldThe area was named for a line of white domes and cliffs of Navajo Sandstone, each of which looks somewhat like the United States Capitol building, that run from the Fremont River to Pleasant Creek on the Waterpocket Fold.

The park is filled with canyons, cliffs, towers, domes, and arches. The Fremont River has cut canyons through parts of the Waterpocket Fold, but most of the park is arid desert country. A scenic drive shows park visitors some of the highlights, but it runs only a few miles from the main highway. Hundreds of miles of trails and unpaved roads lead the more adventurous into the equally scenic backcountry. Click Here to Read the History of Capital Reef