CAPITOL REEF sounds more like something you'd find off the coast of Australia than in the heart of the Utah desert, but in most respects its towering ochre-, white- and red- rock walls and deep river canyons are of a piece with the rest of the region. The outstanding feature is a multilayered, 1000ft-high reef-like wall of uplifted sedimentary rock, a section of which reminded an early traveler of the grand dome of the US Capitol. Stretching for over a hundred miles north to south, but only a few miles across, the seemingly impenetrable barrier of the Waterpocket Fold was warped upward by the same process that lifted the Colorado Plateau, and the sharply defined sedimentary layers on display here trace over two hundred million years of geological activity. The Waterpocket Fold is sliced through in a number of places by deeply incised river canyons - some only twenty feet wide, but hundreds of feet deep - often accessible only by foot.

The one paved road through the park, Hwy-24, cuts across the northern half of the Fold, following the deep canyon of the Fremont River ; motorists who stick to this road do not incur an entrance fee. Beneath the enormous and very prominent Castle , the visitor center (daily: June-Sept 8am-7pm; Oct-May 8am-4.30pm; tel 435/425-3791, ) has explanatory exhibits and an irresistible campground ($10), set amid the cherry, apple and peach orchards of the abandoned Mormon community of FRUITA ; in season, you can pick all the fruit you can gobble down. To the west, the Goosenecks Overlook gazes down 500ft into the entrenched canyons cut by Sulphur Creek. Further east, beyond Fruita's former schoolhouse, are some extraordinary Fremont petroglyphs , figures of bighorn sheep and stylized space-people chipped into the varnished red rock a thousand years ago; a five-minute radio broadcast (AM 1540) describes their makers. Another four and a half miles along, one of Capitol Reef's best day-hikes heads up along the gravelly riverbed through Grand Wash - a beautiful (and usually quite cool) canyon where, it's said, Butch Cassidy and his gang used to hide out.

Few other paved routes run through the park, so to reach the spectacular backcountry canyons you may have to put up with many miles of dusty and spine-rattling roads - renting a mountain bike is a good idea. The paved, popu-lar Scenic Drive ($4 per vehicle) heads twelve miles south from the visitor center, past the top of Grand Wash to Capitol Gorge and back. A more adventurous sixty-mile loop trip explores Cathedral Valley in the north, while a 125-mile southern route starts at the foot of the volcanic Henry Mountains , then follows the Burr Trail through Muley Twist Canyon , and continues west to Boulder.

The nearest food and lodging to Capitol Reef is eleven miles west, in the rapidly growing small town of TORREY , where options include Austin's Chuckwagon , 12 W Main St (tel 435/425-3335 or 1-800/863-3288, ; $50-130), the Wonderland Inn , at the intersection of Hwy-12 and Hwy-24 (tel 435/425-3775 or 1-800/458-0216, ; $50-75), and the Capitol Reef Inn , 360 W Main St (tel 435/425-3271, ; $50-75), which has a small café.

Capitol Reef National Park

• Capitol Reef National Park

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