Highway 24 Scenic Byway

Highway 24 is the road that picks up where Highway 12 leaves off. The two meet in Torrey, and where Highway 12 ends, Highway 24 begins — heading east through the most geologically peculiar 47 miles in Utah.

The peculiarity has a name: the Waterpocket Fold. Around 70 million years ago, the same tectonic forces that lifted the Rocky Mountains caught a section of the earth's crust here and bent it like a fender, creating a 100-mile-long wrinkle that runs north to south through the desert. From the air, it looks exactly like what geologists call it — a monocline, a single steep flexure with one side raised thousands of feet above the other. From the ground, driving Highway 24, you can't quite see the whole shape. What you see are its consequences: cliffs of red Wingate sandstone standing in palisades, white Navajo domes rising in the middle distance, and layer upon layer of rock — Moenkopi, Chinle, Kayenta, Entrada — exposed in the canyon walls like the open pages of a 200-million-year book.

The road threads the fold through Capitol Reef National Park, which protects the most dramatic 15 miles of the formation. The park gets its name from two of those layers: the white Navajo domes that early settlers thought resembled the U.S. Capitol, and the long uplifted ridge of the fold itself, which formed a reef-like barrier to east-west travel for most of human history. Mormon pioneers settled a small fruit-growing community called Fruita in the 1880s in the one place the fold opened — a green valley along the Fremont River, which had cut its way through the sandstone over millennia. The old schoolhouse, orchards, and a wall of Fremont culture petroglyphs are all still there, two minutes off the highway.

East of the park the landscape opens. The Fremont River keeps the road company through Caineville, where badlands of gray Mancos Shale spread out toward the Henry Mountains — the last range in the contiguous United States to be mapped, charted by John Wesley Powell's survey in 1872. Factory Butte, a flat-topped mesa visible for miles, marks the transition to true desert. By the time you reach Hanksville, the elevation has dropped 2,500 feet from Torrey and the air feels different — drier, hotter, more remote.

Hanksville itself is a town of about 200 people at a four-way crossroads. From here Highway 95 runs south toward Lake Powell, Highway 24 continues north to I-70, and the empty country beyond holds Goblin Valley, the Henry Mountains, and the Maze District of Canyonlands — some of the most genuinely remote terrain still accessible by road in the lower forty-eight. Most travelers turn around here, or refuel and keep going. Either is reasonable.

Drive it in either direction, though east-to-west has a particular pleasure: you start in open desert and the cliffs of the fold rise up to meet you, mile by mile, the way they would have for the first wagon teams looking for a way through. Plan two hours minimum if you don't stop, half a day if you do, longer if Capitol Reef catches you the way it tends to.

The Drive, Stop by Stop

6 stops along the route, in driving order from Torrey to Hanksville.

1. 1

   Torrey

   Torrey

   The eastern terminus of Highway 12 and the western gateway to Capitol Reef. Most travelers stop here for food, gas, and a bed before heading into the park — Torrey has more lodging than any other town for forty miles in either direction. The intersection of Highway 12 and Highway 24 happens right in the middle of town, an unceremonious four-way stop that's actually one of the more geographically significant crossroads in the American West: it's where the red-rock scenic-byway country effectively ends and the deeper desert begins.

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2. 2

   Capitol Reef National Park

   Torrey

   The park is the reason most people drive Highway 24, and the road is the only way through it. Capitol Reef protects 15 miles of the Waterpocket Fold — the same geological uplift visible from Highway 12, here exposed in its most dramatic form. The visitor center sits a few minutes off the highway and is worth a stop for the orientation alone: a relief model in the lobby finally makes the fold's hundred-mile geometry comprehensible. No entrance fee is required to drive Highway 24 through the park — the fee only applies to the Scenic Drive south of the visitor center.

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3. 3

   Hickman Bridge Trail

   Torrey

   The single best short hike in Capitol Reef, and one of the best in southern Utah. Two miles round-trip, moderate elevation gain, and at the end a 133-foot natural bridge spanning a side canyon. The trail starts directly off Highway 24 about two miles east of the visitor center — no scenic-drive fee required, no shuttle, just a small parking area on the north side of the road. Best in early morning before the canyon walls trap the heat. Allow 90 minutes round-trip with stops for photos.

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4. 4

   Gifford Homestead

   Torrey

   A short detour south of Highway 24 into Fruita, the Mormon fruit-growing settlement that became the heart of Capitol Reef. The 1908 homestead is now a small store selling pies — peach, apple, mixed-berry — baked daily and routinely sold out by early afternoon. The orchards around the building are still maintained by the Park Service, and the fruit is free to pick in season (summer through early fall). The schoolhouse and petroglyph panel are within a five-minute drive. Two minutes off the highway, easily an hour if you let it be.

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5. 5

   Goblin Valley State Park

   Hanksville

   Not technically on Highway 24 — it's a 12-mile detour north on a paved spur road — but the turnoff is on Highway 24 and the park is the strangest landscape within an hour of Hanksville. Thousands of mushroom-shaped sandstone hoodoos cover the valley floor, eroded from the same Entrada formation that built the Navajo Domes back in Capitol Reef. The state park charges an entrance fee but stays open year-round, and the goblins are best photographed at low sun — early morning or late afternoon, when the shadows give the formations dimension.

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6. 6

   Hanksville

   Hanksville

   The eastern bookend of Highway 24, and the practical anchor of an enormous empty quarter of Utah. Population under 200, sitting where Highway 24 meets Highway 95. Seven miles northwest of town, a dirt road called Cow Dung Road leads to the Mars Desert Research Station — the longest-running Mars analog habitat on the planet, built here in 2001 because the surrounding badlands genuinely look like Mars. Gas up, eat something, and consider that you have just driven the road that ends where another planet begins.

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That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let Highway 24 Scenic Byway do what it does best.