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April 21st, 2013: Capitol Reef NP, Utah.
The next morning we drove East on Utah 24 to the nearby Capitol Reefs National Park, again stopping at the Visitor’s Center for maps and information. That National Park also had a main road running southward through it, starting at the old Mormon settlement of Fruita.
So we meandered South on that road to its end, and then drove 2 miles East on a well-groomed dirt road to the Capitol George area, where we walked down a canyon.
Being at the bottom of a narrow, rocky canyon with steep stone cliffs on either side was a new experience for us, and we both enjoyed the walk very much. Around each bend in the canyon we found some new, oddly shaped, carved, and eroded formation of rocks. There even were some pictographs on one of the rocks at the side of the gorge. And Monika saw some quail scurrying away.
Since we enjoyed that so much, we took a second walk up a canyon at the Grand Wash Trail that branched off the main road a little South of Fruta. Once again I had to drive the Prius on a dirt road, but I hewed to the speed limit of 15 mph and carefully avoided any stones that might stick up high enough to damage the Prius’s low-slung undercarriage. This time we walked about 45 minutes down a trail along the wash in the bottom of the canyon and once again I enjoyed the ever-changing set of formations from down below.
There were several interesting stone formation and Monika named them all: "The Lizard", "Dinosaur Head", "The Head of the Phantom", and "The Monkey".
But that was enough walking for the day, so we hiked back to the car and drove East stopping first to see some really clearly-incised pictographs just off the road.
From there we drove East through some bizarre areas resembling the “Painted Desert” over to Hanksville. There we had lunch in the Burger Shack where we had eaten with Chris almost exactly a week before. Monika took over for the drive northeast to Interstate I-70, which we then followed to Fruta, Colorado, which was just outside Grand Junction. Grand Junction had a Toyota dealer and our Prius was becoming more and more insistent on getting its 5,000 mile inspection. I just hate being nagged by a car!
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