Nearly 140 years after Latter-Day Saints first planted fruit trees, Fruita is part of Utah's Capitol Reef National Park—but is facing threats from climate change and a surge in tourism.
Nearly 140 years after Latter-Day Saints first planted fruit trees, Fruita is part of Utah's Capitol Reef National Park—but is facing threats from climate change and a surge in tourism.
May 31, 2019
In the heart of the red rock desert in southeast Utah, the Fremont River and Sulphur Creek valleys intersect. A verdant spread of fruit trees spill out from this junction, a startling juxtaposition of lush green against the dusty orange canyon walls rising up hundreds of feet.
Early in the morning, while the shadows of the cliffs provide respite from the heat of the desert, visitors to Capitol Reef National Park haul step-ladders into the orchards to harvest apricots, pears, apples, and peaches from the trees. Following the weekly picking schedule posted in the park throughout the summer months, parkgoers pay $1 a pound to carry fruit out of the orchards to enjoy after exploring the natural arches and geologic folds.
The orchards were planted in 1881 by a group of homesteaders belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) who set out from Salt Lake City to settle southern Utah in the name of the Church. They eventually established more than 3,100 fruit trees across 181 acres of irrigated orchards in the high desert valley.
The pocket of orchards and homesteads, which eventually included a school, a dugout wash road, and a massive cottonwood tree with mailboxes nailed into it, came to be known as Fruita. The district required an extensive system of ditch irrigation, dug manually and maintained each year, to extend the flow of water beyond the seasonal floodplains of the Fremont River and Sulphur Creek.
For 50 years, the settlers lived in a close-knit LDS community, until local residents launched a campaign to designate the area as a park or reserve due to its unique geology. In 1937, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt named the area a National Monument. Fruita became the headquarters of Capitol Reef when it became a National Park in 1971, and received infrastructural improvements, including a campground, picnicking spaces, and a connection to State Highway 24 through the Fremont River Canyon.
Over the past century, the National Park Service planted semi-dwarf varieties of apple trees that were not growing during the pioneer settlement period for which the rural historic district is recognized. The Park Service is working to replace aging trees with the original cultivars that the settlers planted.
Planting native varieties that are adapted to the area is also an attempt to lessen the effects of climate change, which will bring increasing summer temperatures and more erratic rainfall to southern Utah. As rainfall decreases, the park will need to move away from flood irrigation to less water intensive methods of orchard maintenance.
Capitol Reef is not the only park within the National Park System that is charged with maintaining historic orchards; there are 101 properties with aging trees across the country that pose a similar suite of horticultural and maintenance challenges. These concerns offer the chance for units to collaborate to find best practices to keep orchards open to the public, and to handle increasing visitation.
“Five years ago we had 600,000 visitors when the park was only designed to handle about 100,000 annually. Now that number is 1.3 million,” says Jim Roche, acting chief of natural resources and management at Capitol Reef National Park. “It’s certainly the smallest of the big five National Parks in Utah, but like all parks across America that are seeing huge increases in visitors, it’s a challenge to live up to.”
Against this background of managing public access and conserving the historic landscape, the challenges of transforming Fruita from a rural LDS outpost to a productive landscape fixture within the National Parks system remain.
All photos © Kira Clingen.
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