Capitol Reef - for real this time!

We have been to Capitol Reef NP a few times; some on our own, and once with the University for a geology field trip/class, but we have never really "explored" the park as we would have liked to.  This time we still didn't have lots of time, but we took 5 hikes that totaled up we did about 13 miles in the 2 days we were there.  It was wonderful and oh so beautiful!  We hiked:  Goosenecks, Sunset Point, the Grand Wash (just shy of the end since we had done it before with the University and Paul's foot was hurting), Hickman Bridge, Chimney Rock Loop and Cassidy Arch.  Each one was amazing in it's own way.  It was also wonderful that even though it is President's Day weekend, there were not very many people in the Park.  Some places we didn't even see people for most of the hike (Hickman Bridge).  It was cold, and some places were a bit muddy from the recent rains or from recently melted snow, but we wore our long underwear under our hiking clothes and were really comfortable with jackets/gloves only sometimes. We spent the night in Torrey (Friday) and ate at a very expensive restaurant on Friday evening.  It was good, but no very much for the price.  Lots of things were not yet open.  We had a great time!  On the way home we stopped at Ruby's Inn at Bryce canyon and made up for our bad food experience with a great dinner!  

"...the light seems to flow or shine out of the rock rather than to be reflected from it."  Clarence Dutton, geologist and early explorer of Capitol Reef, 1880s

"Geology knows no such word as forever."  Wallace Stegner  

As we went up the Hickman Bridge trail we came to this little Native American structure up on a ledge  (top left pic). We were able to scramble up close enough to take a good picture of it. Pretty cool! After that, we came to these two little bridges.  At first we thought this was Hickman Bridge and we were just a little disappointed that it wasn't bigger.  Then we decided to keep going up the trail a bit further, and Paul spotted the REAL bridge, which is huge.  Glad we kept on going!  

At Cassidy Arch we saw a grandfather, son, daughter and 4 very small kids doing a rappel down from the arch and then they were going on down the canyon with 6 more rappels to go.  The first rappel was 180 feet and looked really scary. I looked it up after we got home and it is really a neat place with several more arches/bridges that you rappel down through to get to the bottom of the canyon.  Not something I would want to do with little kids.  The older ones were pretty excited to go, but some of the very little ones were howling about for a while.