The ranger handed me a grocery bag and said, “Fill this with fruit for two dollars. Don't shake the trees. The trees are older than your grandparents.”
My friend Jamie and I were standing in the middle of a historic orchard at Capitol Reef National Park. The air smelled like ripe peaches and dust. No crowds. No shuttle buses. Just us and a few Mormon pioneer ghosts who planted these trees in the 1880s.
Most people drive through Utah hitting Zion and Bryce. Those parks had five million visitors combined last year. Capitol Reef got 1.2 million. That's still a lot, but the park is so spread out that you feel alone after walking five minutes from the road.
The entrance fee is $20 per vehicle for seven days. No gate. Just a self-pay station near the visitor center. We arrived on a Friday afternoon and saw maybe thirty cars total.
From Salt Lake City, we rented a sedan for $40 a day. The drive took three and a half hours through desert and small towns. Gas cost us $55 round trip. We slept in the back of the car at a free campsite on BLM land just outside the park boundary. A group of stargazers set up telescopes nearby and let us look at Saturn. Free.
The must-do hike is Cassidy Arch. Named after Butch Cassidy, who supposedly hid out here. Three miles round trip, 600 feet of climbing. The trail scrambles over slickrock with no shade. We started at 7 AM and were the second car at the trailhead. The arch at the top is big enough to stand under. Jamie stood under it and yelled “Worth it!” A chipmunk yelled back. Not really, but it felt like it.
The hidden spot no one talks about is the Lower Muley Twist Canyon. The road to get there is unpaved and terrible. Our rental car complaint later. We parked at the trailhead and walked five miles through a narrow slot canyon with walls that changed colors every hour. Red, orange, purple, gray. We saw two other people the entire day – a geology professor and his grad student. The professor pointed at a rock layer and talked for ten minutes. We nodded. The grad student looked exhausted.
After the hike, we drove to the Gifford Homestead inside the park. A small house built in 1908 that now sells pies. One fruit pie costs $6. Jamie bought a peach pie. I bought an apple. We sat on the porch eating them while a horse watched from a nearby corral. The pie was warm. The horse looked jealous.
For dinner, we drove fifteen minutes to the town of Torrey. A place called La Cueva serves burritos the size of a toddler's torso. Two burritos and two horchatas cost $28 total. We ate half and saved the rest for breakfast. The gas station in Torrey has $5 sandwiches. Stick with the burrito.
Camping inside the park at Fruita Campground costs $25 a night. Sites have shade trees and picnic tables. A family of deer walked through our site at dusk. The mother deer stopped, looked at Jamie's leftover pie crust on the ground, and kept walking. Pie crust seems to be the one thing deer don't eat.
The worst part is the lack of water. Bring twice what you think you need. We carried three liters each on the Muley Twist hike and ran out an hour before the finish. My lips cracked. Jamie's did too. We shared an emergency electrolyte packet and looked like zombies for the last mile.
Season warning: Summer hits 38 degrees Celsius. We went in mid-May. High of 28, low of 10. Perfect. The orchards peak in July and August for peaches, September for apples. We came too early for fruit. The trees only had tiny green balls. The ranger still charged us two dollars for the bag. We picked nothing. Worth it anyway.
The cheapest activity is free. Drive the Scenic Drive past the campground to the unpaved section called Capitol Gorge. Walk the one-mile wash into a narrow canyon with pioneer signatures carved into the walls from the 1800s. The names are faded but real. A guy named “J. H. 1883” scratched his name on a rock that still stands. Jamie put her hand on it and said, “That guy would have loved Instagram.” Probably true.
Two days, two people, no showers, no fruit, one borrowed telescope view of Saturn. Total cost including rental car, gas, camping, entrance fee, burritos, and pies: $142 per person.
Jamie looked at the receipt from Gifford Homestead and said, “I spent more on a parking ticket in Salt Lake last month.” The horse in the corral neighed. I think they agreed. Capitol Reef doesn't try hard. That's exactly why it works.
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