Visiting here was a first for us. I was so enamored with the flowers, I'm doing a post devoted solely to them. This is merely a small slice of the beautiful diversity we discovered in every canyon.

Capitol Reef National Park contains nearly a quarter million acres in the slickrock country of Utah. Plant and animal life is diverse because of a variety of habitats such as pinyon-juniper, perennial streams, dry washes and rock cliffs.







The combination of wide ranging elevations and precipitation, coupled with the diverse geology and topography, allows 85 vegetation associations to exist in the park. A total of 887 plant species occur in the park many of which have very restricted distributions, occuring on specific geologic formations, soils, slopes, or elevation or precipitation ranges. Capitol Reef National Park has more than 40 rare and endemic plant species, six of which are federally listed as threatened or endangered. Oh man, we are going to have to return to discover even more.