The Fremont River and Sulphur Creek meet at Fruita, the green center of the park, where about 2,000 fruit trees grow on land farmed long before the settlers came. Irrigation ditches from the 1880s still water the orchards, and in season visitors may pick ripe fruit where signs allow, paying at a self-pay scale.
Green, finally. Not by accident. The Fremont River and Sulphur Creek meet just down this road, and what they carry makes this ground more fertile than anything around it. Long before the orchards, the people archeologists call the Fremont grew corn here, between fifteen hundred and seven hundred years ago, and likely irrigated it. Paiute bands are believed to have ranged here too, the park's history says, and this is historic Ute territory. Settlers came late, squatters at first, then Nels Johnson, the first to homestead. They called the place Junction, and never had it to themselves. Every fall Navajo traders came through, swapping blankets for horses. Dewey Gifford remembered one party riding off with a gift turkey tied by its feet to a saddle, swinging against the horse. The ditches pioneers dug in the eighteen eighties still water about two thousand trees. At the U-Pick signs, pick what's ripe, weigh it and pay at the scale. Leave the traps in the branches alone. Whatever you eat in the orchard is free.
Photo: NPS / Chris Roundtree · Public domain (U.S. Government work)