Peaches named J.H. Hale and Baby Crawford. Black Tartarian cherries. The Winter Banana — which is actually an apple.
This is fruit with a name and a pedigree.
The 19 orchards of Capitol Reef National Park, part of the vaunted Mighty 5, were planted by the Mormon pioneer families who used to call this part of south-central Utah home. Back in 1880, it was known as the town of Fruita. Today, the park carries on the tradition with roughly 2,000 fruit trees.
“Cherries, apricots, peaches, pears, plums, apples,” said Visitor Services Program Manager Shauna Cotrell. “Occasionally, you might find a few quince trees.”
Many of Capitol Reef’s historic trees, like the century-old apricot giant Cotrell happens to be standing next to, are nearing the end of their life. That’s why the park’s groundbreaking orchard rehabilitation project has planted around 700 new trees since 2022.
To maintain the orchards in the way settlers did more than a century ago, the focus is on cultivating heirloom varieties. Many have become increasingly rare as more common varieties cornered the market.
For some, like the park’s namesake red apple, these orchards might be their last hope.
“If we lose the Capitol Reef Red here, it's gone,” Cotrell said.
Nearly 24,000 pounds of fruit were harvested last year by 1.2 million annual visitors. You can eat your fill in the orchards for free and take fruit home at $2 a pound.
Unlike the relatively barren high desert that surrounds them, the orchards’ valley is lush green — a meandering oasis that follows the path of the Fremont River. The neighboring red cliffs even lend a hand, soaking up the sun’s warmth and releasing it back into the valley at night to hold off frost. The fertile conditions drew Indigenous farmers for thousands of years, long before settlers planted their European-style fruit.
Even a landscape this idyllic isn’t immune to the threats of climate change, however.
There’s concern the trees may begin to bloom earlier as springs warm up. That could throw the timing off with pollinators like bees and butterflies, whose fluttering work is essential to producing fruit. Another worry is that thunderstorms will become less frequent but more intense and lead to increased flooding, erosion or shifting of the river.
Small environmental changes can pile on top of the other challenges the trees face from invasive species, diseases and humans, said Park Superintendent Cass Bromley. So getting a little extra drought might just tip the scales against them.
“Climate change isn't occurring in a vacuum, it's one more stressor. So … if the trees aren't healthy because the climate has shifted a little bit, and they're not quite getting what they need, then they're more vulnerable.”
The orchard rehabilitation is not easy work.
Park staff have had to become history detectives, identifying which fruit varieties settlers grew here ages ago. Horticulturist Fritz Maslan said that means pouring over written records and oral histories. Then they have to find living specimens — if they still exist.
One example is the Early Crawford peach. The park confirmed it once grew here, Maslan said, but then it disappeared. After diving down a research rabbit hole, his team found one or two of those trees in California.
“In another 15 years, if that orchardist was done with what they were doing, and got rid of those trees, it might have been gone,” he said. “You're never gonna get that specific genetic cross back. There's so many millions of genes that would have to combine the right way.”
Once they have samples from those California specimens, they’ll use them to make new trees through grafting — a process of physically joining part of a tree onto a set of roots already planted in the ground.
There are some big reasons why preserving heirloom fruit matters, said Todd Little-Siebold, a history professor at the College of the Atlantic in Maine.
One is scientific. Having more varieties means our food system is less vulnerable to pests, disease and future climate extremes. The second is more sentimental — remembering the way our ancestors might have lived through the food they ate, with unique fruit varieties associated with different regions, seasons and purposes.
“In the world that we live in today, inspiration and deliciousness and stories are really good for our souls,” said Little-Siebold, who describes himself as a fruit historian.
Utah and the Mountain West had a fruit boom in the 1910s to 1930s, he said, as a few key factors lined up in the region’s favor.
First, Utah’s dry desert conditions meant farmers didn’t have to worry about the pests and diseases that plagued them elsewhere. Second, East Coast orchards were in decline at that time as the country’s founding core urbanized and industrialized. Lastly, railroads made it possible to ship fruit from the West to big cities back East, filling the gap left by those declining farms.
The Western fruit boom faded, he said, during the rise of supermarket chains. And with it, many heirloom cultivars went out of style. Eventually, the typical American produce aisle offered just a few types of apples year-round. Commercial orchards grew larger and more homogenized to meet that demand.
But today, the country has seen a bit of an heirloom fruit renaissance, Little-Siebold said. He’s now part of a nationwide group of researchers working to identify historic apple varieties and educate communities about them.
The work at Capitol Reef and elsewhere “to reintroduce people to these amazing apples — much better than anything you can get in the store today — really helps people understand what's been lost through this collapse of the diverse food system,” he said.
An orchard along State Route 24 in Capitol Reef illustrates this hope.
There’s not much shade to be found here — just rows and rows of young trees, no more than a few feet tall. Some, like the Lambert cherry, historically grew in the Fruita area and then vanished. Now, the rehabilitation project is bringing them back.
More than a dozen varieties of apple trees have been planted in this single small field over the past three springs, including some new Capitol Reef Reds.
The project hasn’t been without speed bumps, Bromley said. A lot of new trees died the first year, likely because crews dug up too much of the land — messing with the soil and irrigation ditches The next two springs, park staff adjusted their approach, minimizing how much ground they disturbed and retaining as many older trees as possible.
Even though it’s a pilot project that’s expected to wrap up in 2025, Bromley said, the park plans to continue the work — using what they’ve learned to better protect the orchards for future generations.
When they preserve these trees, she said, they’re also preserving the story behind them. So every time someone pulls an apple or apricot off a branch and takes a bite, they’ll get a fuller taste of Utah’s past.
“We have a little bit of a bully pulpit,” Bromley said. “We've got 1.2 million visitors and we have this good opportunity to raise their curiosity.”
