This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Dear National Park Service,

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! You're 100 years old now and to celebrate, my husband and I spent last weekend in and around Capitol Reef. OK. Kidding. We weren't there for your birthday. We just wanted to go. But still. Happy birthday!

Personally, I'm glad you're around, and here's something we discovered on this recent trip: It's even more fun to visit a national park without the kids! I didn't have to tell my husband to stop crying. I also didn't have to promise I'd buy him a Slurpee as soon as we finished hiking. Not even once. Score! See? There are some advantages to being aging Baby Boomers.

But that's not the point.

The point is that because of you, there are wild places left to visit. And of all the wild places left to visit, Capitol Reef and the surrounding areas are probably my favorite. Why? Well, you've got that color thing going on there. Everywhere you look there are rocks the color of blood and elephants, salt and lilacs, cocoa and moss, fool's gold and raspberries, topped with silvery plants and dead trees rising up against a cerulean sky like black antlers.

I like the sounds there, too. As I drifted off to sleep the first night, I thought I heard the familiar rush of downtown traffic — a sound I routinely hear on summer evenings through my open window. But then I realized it was the wind, playing through the trees. I heard crickets, as well, and birds during the day, including the raspy croak of a raven.

Here's another park pleasure — looking for shapes in stones. Some of the formations look like people — Christmas carolers huddling together on a front porch, a row of stout great-aunts looking down on visitors and passing judgment, a boxer with bare knuckles showing, the faces on Mt. Rushmore only partially carved.

Other formations look like objects — toy transformers, a bike helmet, mushrooms, a row of garbage cans upended by a windstorm, sheets of ribbon cake, a mask discarded by the Phantom of the Opera, skulls bleached clean by relentless light, a crouching gnome, those monoliths on Easter Island.

Still other formations recall structures, especially places of worship — cathedrals and synagogues, temples and mosques with minarets. There are skyscrapers, too. Hello, Fifth Avenue! You want some Roman ruins and medieval fortresses? Capitol Reef is your place.

Oh. And don't forget the rocks that look like animals — a colony of Emperor penguins, a chimp on a ledge surveying the stone jungle below, a half-submerged hippo, the heads of a turtle and a buffalo, a sea lion sunning.

So yeah. The park is a feast for the senses. But what I love the best — the very best — is that feeling I have of hurtling back through space and time to stand in an ancient place where life has gone on for years and years and will go on for years and years after I leave this Earth. A place where junipers reveal blue-green berries like jewels season after season. A place where wind and water take a thousand years to shape a single stone. A place that always invites you to remember that the world is so much larger than you yourself and the burdens you carry.

A place that invites you to put those burdens aside — at least for now — while you stop and listen to the sound of a breeze and your own heart beating.

Ann Cannon can be reached at acannon@sltrib.com or facebook.com/anncannontrib.