Capitol Reef National Park is an American national park located in south-central Utah. The park was established in 1971 to preserve 241,904 acres of desert landscape and is open all year. Capitol Reef National Park was initially designated a national monument on August 2, 1937, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to protect the area's colorful canyons, ridges, buttes, and monoliths; however, it was not until 1950 that the area officially opened to the public. The park was named for whitish Navajo Sandstone cliffs with dome formations (similar to the white domes often placed on capitol buildings) that run from the Fremont River to Pleasant Creek on the Waterpocket Fold. The local word reef refers to any rocky barrier to land travel, just as ocean reefs are barriers to sea travel.
Sunrise at Blue Valley near Factory Butte. Factory Butte Badlands is a little-known moon-like terrain northwest of Hanksville, Utah. You could fly to the moon and quite possibly not see something that looks so “Moon-like” as you will see here. Wayne County is known for its terrain that looks extraterrestrial.
Zabriskie Point is a part of the Amargosa Range located east of Death Valley in Death Valley National Park in California, United States, noted for its erosional landscape. Every imaginable shade of gold--from orange to apricot to school-bus yellow--is visible in the wrinkled Golden Canyon cliffs, whose folded and eroded layers glow at sunrise and sunset. It is composed of sediments from Furnace Creek Lake, which dried up 5 million years ago—long before Death Valley came into existence.
