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Pleasant Creek Route, Photo Gallery, Capitol Reef National Park, Utah

Pleasant Creek Route

Capitol Reef National Park

Pleasant Creek flows west - east through the Waterpocket Fold in Capitol Reef National Park. An unmaintained but intuitively followed route traces the creek approximately four miles from the trailhead on Pleasant Creek Road to the Park’s east boundary. Exact distances will vary by your route and efficiency across open flats, scalable sandstone formations and numerous bends in the creek. Pleasant Creek is one of few perennial streams and natural passages through the Waterpocket Fold, a critical resource for humans over many millennia.

At about 2.5 miles, Pleasant Creek cuts through a wavy slickrock canyon floor where water is funnelled through voluminous cascades that can be viewed from above

There are several unmarked petroglyph panels along Pleasant Creek, most featuring works from the Fremont Culture that lived here from 600 - 1300 AD

The Pleasant Creek corridor falls within the Hartnett Allotment, one of two grazing allotments in the Park; here you may encounter free range cattle from October 15 - May 31

Desert Varnish is comprised of clay minerals, oxides and hydroxides of manganese and / or iron, as well as other particles such as sand grains and trace elements

Navajo Sandstone Domes, prominent features along lower sections of Pleasant Creek, are comprised of thick layers of cross-bedded sandstone formed by windblown sand

Terrestrial features such as impassabile thickets of vegetation, boulders and cliffs will force you to cross the creek many times

Pleasant Creek is one of only a few natural passages through the Waterpocket Fold, and was critical to settlers seeking to connect remote regions of SE Utah

In recent years there's been a shift in how past civilizations are described: it's now considered more accurate to say "The people called the Fremont Culture by archeologists lived in this area for 600 years"