I’m not sure how obvious it is to you all, but things are moving along quite quickly here at AdventureBro Mobile HQ, and it’s getting hard for me to keep up. For that reason please don’t take my brief treatment of Capitol Reef to mean that it’s any less noteworthy (..or did my introduction just make that ever so slightly more inevitable?)
Capitol Reef National Park (map / wiki) encompasses a 75 mile crinkle in the earths crust called a waterpocket fold.
The quick and dirty explanation of how this geologic curiosity formed is as follows: Layers of sandstone were folded and the high hump of the fold was eroded, exposing about 40 million years of geologic history from the Jurassic Period between 200 and 160 million years ago (mya).
Translation: Colorful Rocks!
Here are a few pictures of interesting rocks I came across.
I hiked down Pleasant Creek for a couple miles before setting up camp (9/30/15). I don’t mean to be a solitude snob, but it’s actually kind of hard to secure for yourself any significant piece of wilderness in the national parks.
I didn’t come across anyone for 18 hours along Pleasant Creek.
The area surrounding the national parks in Utah are almost as spectacular as the parks themselves.
The badlands in the above picture are off of Highway 24, 30 miles east of Capitol Reef. The picture below is from Boulder (I think) which is 40 miles south of Capitol Reef on Highway 12.
