The travels of the Rambling Roses: Capital Reef National Park June 27

June 27-----Never heard of Capital Reef National Park? Neither had we. How can a reef be in the desert? The reef here is made of rock. It is a mountain range of beautiful color that is 95 miles long. It an uprising that occurred under glaciers millions of years ago. The glaciers melted, volcanoes that had gone off under water had spewed lava rock everywhere, and the mountain range was impassable to explorers. Therefore, the name 'Reef'. Capital Reef National Park is the least visited an one of the most isolated of the national parks. We HAD to explore it. It has a modern story of Mormon settlers in a town called Fruita, because of the fruit orchards that are still here. You can pick apples, apricots, peaches, cherries, and other fruit off the trees and eat it for FREE, when it is ripe and they open the orchards. There are fantastic petroglyphs and pictographs from the puebloan natives of 800 years ago. There are canyons that you can drive a Jeep through, and trails at the end of that. We had a picnic in a shaded area, and there were woodpeckers, deer, crazy little chipmunk-like squirrels, and marmots within fifty feet of us as we ate. Butch Cassidy hid in the same canyons we walked. I saw mountain lion or bobcat tracks in the sand next to the 'tanks', which were big rock bowls of water way up in a canyon in the middle of the desert, left over from snowmelt or rains, months ago. It was also hot as hell. There were NO Orientals with cameras! It was a cool place. The rocks were the stars of the show. The colors were a deep red, there were piles of grey lava dust, there were white rocks laying in red dirt, there were colors that I can't describe because they were never in MY crayon box. Great place. Torrey, Utah is a neat little town nestled among these rocks. I had never heard of any of these places I have been to since I left Bryce Canyon. This is all SO COOL!