Old Wagon Trail

Shut the engine off a minute and listen. If I go quiet when you shut it off, give the quiet its minute, then tap play. This pullout sits on a real road. The old dirt way from Fruita to Grover ran here, and the trail follows part of it, a loop of three point eight miles that climbs over a thousand feet. It's strenuous, and there's no water at the trailhead, so carry a gallon a person. Outlaws crossed this country too. Blue John and Silver Tip were taken through Capitol Reef under guard on their way to trial in Loa. That's no legend. The canyons were the only practical way through the Fold, so any outlaw passing through likely rode them. The bighorn had the run of it long before that. By nineteen thirty-four they were all but gone, and domestic sheep had brought the disease. Then people carried the bighorn home, in the nineteen eighties farther south, and twenty at a time in nineteen ninety-six and ninety-seven, into Pleasant Creek and Capitol Gorge. The ground under you has a record of its own. From December of nineteen seventy-eight to January of nineteen eighty, a swarm of at least thirty-eight small earthquakes struck near the park. A nineteen eighty-three study called it the highest level of natural seismicity observed inside the Colorado Plateau. Listen again. You'd never guess.