A pullout on Highway 24 faces a cliff of Moenkopi rock worn into repeating pillars and alcoves. The stop unpacks the words in the park's name and its great feature, notes who relied on the waterpockets first, and passes on the local story behind a nearby flat at the foot of the Mummy Cliffs.
Under half a mile now to the Fluted Wall. The name is honest. This is Moenkopi rock, about two hundred fifty million years old, cut into a back-and-forth rank of pillars and alcoves, as if someone pleated a cliff. The pull-off's on your left. Here's how the park got its name, in two halves. Capitol is for the white domes up top, which looked like capitol buildings. Reef is for the cliffs, a barrier the way an ocean reef is, a word from prospectors with seafaring pasts. Waterpocket is plainer. Gritty water grinds a hole in solid rock, floods deepen it, and the rain fills it. Powell's men depended on them, and they weren't the first. And Whiskey Flat, at the foot of the Mummy Cliffs near here? The story goes that two men drank their purchase so fast they couldn't get back up the hill.
Photo: John Manard / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped)