The paved Scenic Drive ends here at the mouth of Capitol Gorge, with parking for cars and buses, covered picnic tables, vault toilets and no water. A dirt road continues when it's open. The dead end is deliberate, the result of a decision about how visitors should see the park, and this is where the tour's two rangers explain it.
This is it. Keep left past the dirt road on your right, and the lot's on your right just after it, where the pavement quits. Not stopping? Loop through the lot and head back the way you came. But whatever else you've skipped, don't skip this. If I cut out when the engine stops, tap play. You'll find tables and vault toilets, and no water. Capitol Gorge Road runs on from here. It's dirt, it closes often, so read the sign and don't plan on it. Going back, four pullouts and three stops in Fruita each hold a clip, earthquakes, a dentist's stone fence, a polygamist hideout that probably wasn't. Pull in and it plays. This road stops here on purpose. For about eighty years it didn't. The only road east from Fruita ran on from this spot through the narrows, and it was Utah Highway twenty-four, buried by every flash flood and turned, in the wet, to what the park's history calls a gluey soup. The wall won every argument until nineteen sixty-two, when the new highway finally got through along the river. The Park Service had already done the thing I love most about this place. It wanted you to stay longer. So its nineteen fifty-nine plan made this road a dead end, to turn you around and send you back through Fruita. Every settler story on this tour has been about getting past this wall. The last answer anyone gave was, don't. Stop. Look at it. If you've stopped, stay by the car. Boone starts on his own in a moment, for about two and a half minutes.
Photo: Famartin / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped)