Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Capitol Reef, part 2

Really windy outside, so I'm doing this on my laptop in the lobby building of our campsite. We hiked a fair bit today around the park. Learned that the correct spelling for the park is "capitol", not "capital". It's "capitol" because there's a rock formation here that looks like the capitol building in DC. I'm not really sure which one, haha, but here's an archetype of the kind of formation (it might be this one off in the back leftish):



Not sure why it's called "capitol reef", there's no ocean here. We did go to a ranger presentation last night on the history of the area with an emphasis on women. There were a lot of examples. Many were the wives of Mormons in the area. The lecture ended with an admonition to remember the wives whenever reading about the Mormon men that settled this area.

We hiked up the Grand Wash this morning. The floor of this steep canyon can flood catastrophically and the evidence of that was all around us as we hiked.







It's not possible to provide a photo that really does justice to the scale and beauty of this canyon:





Similarly the longer vistas are striking, but these photos fail them miserably:









We ate at "The Saddlery" next door this evening--our first restaurant meal of the trip. Basically bar food. Had a hamburger and fries that were very good. The real puzzle about this place is that it is in an absolutely massive cinderblock building and the restaurant inside uses the fully open interior (I'm guessing 5000 sq ft). Tables were separated from each other by 30 feet. The wait staff really got a workout serving in this place. Not sure what the story behind the overly large building was (in a small town there's always a story).

We're thinking of heading back to the park this evening for the ranger presentation--frogs, lizards and snakes.

We'll be heading on to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado tomorrow. A very different climate from Capitol Reef (it was pushing a dry desert 100 degrees today).

Finally, I learned today that there is a competing blog by someone named Laura Schueller called VillaWalla that promised to corroborate every word of this blog. Or, more likely, set the record straight.

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