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Show refill i uy 4 - . ' -. . .,--Y"i" ; :-; - ' - . : ".. .. 'VI t .-" ., -.. ' Capitol Reef National Park A Must Capitol Reef National Park headquarters, head-quarters, although actually located in Wayne County, is easily accessible accessi-ble from Garfield County via the Boulder Mountain road, in its final stage of completion and suitable for travel for all vehicles. The travelers can save more than 50 miles of travel and see some of the finest and most spectacular scenery on earth by traveling this new route connecting Bryce Can yon, Capitol Reef and Canyon-lands Canyon-lands National Park. The Park is also accessible from The Burr Trail out of Boulder. The Park is also accessible from the Burr Trail, an improved dirt road out of Boulder. It is suitable for passenger vehicles in good weather, but not recommended for those with trailers. It traverses the park's incredible in-credible "Waterpocket Fold" through some of the world's most remarkable scenery and leads to Bullfrog Marina at Lake Powell. The Navajo Indians called the Park the "Land of the Sleeping Rainbow" a strange but beautiful beauti-ful country where colors of the rainbow rain-bow can be seen in the many rock layers. Today, 378-square-mile Capitol Reef National Park, one of Utah's five national parks, is located in the heart of "Canyon Country" on State Highway U-24, about halfway between be-tween Canyonlands and Bryce Can- yon National Parks. Capitol Reef was so rugged and remote that it was left almost undisturbed un-disturbed by white settlers until the late 1800s. It was very much like an ocean reef around a tropical island is-land very difficult and dangerous to cross. As a matter of fact, that's how Capitol Reef got its name. It, too, was a barrier to travel and had large white sandstone domes that looked like the U. S. Capitol in Washington, D. C. The first white explorers found Paiutc Indians hunting in the nearby near-by mountains during summer months, and following game ani- i mals down to lower, warmer valleys val-leys during the winter. The Paiutes, however, were not the first inhabitants inhabi-tants of Capitol Reef. Earlier, the Fremont Indians lived in rock shelters shel-ters and farmed the river valleys from 800 A. D. to 1200 A. D. (See CAPITOL REEF on WBll) CAPITOL REEF (Continued From Page WB10) These early settlers of Capitol Reef left rock carvings and picture writing writ-ing (pctroglyphs) that arc difficult to understand clearly. In the late 1700s, Father Escalante, Esca-lante, a Spanish explorer, passed 50 miles west of Capitol Reef. Later, Colonel John C. Fremont, on his last western expedition in the fall and winter of 1853-54, explored the region north of the Colorado River. By 1866, Mormon settlers had begun be-gun to occupy land to the west of Capitol Reef. Their knowledge of Capitol Reef no doubt increased when Captain James Andrus of St. George, Utah, led a posse into the Capitol Reef area looking for Indian raiders. The first white pioneer families established homes along the Fremont Fre-mont River near Capitol Reef in the 1880s. Long droughts, frequent flooding, wind, cold, insects and lonely isolation would sevcrly test the hardy Mormon colonists. |