A thousand promises shelter in Pleasant Valley, tucked in the middle of Capitol Reef National Park. There, crumbling scarlet Moenkopi earth meets morning and Wingate sandstone cliffs rise, singing millennia of rust and fire, mourning in sheets of dripping desert varnish. Mormon tea and juniper, buffalo berry and prickly pear, thin-leafed tamarisk and chattering cottonwood keep watch as Pleasant Creek flows northeast between sandy banks. The calls of Townsend’s solitaires, canyon wrens and mountain bluebirds echo from cliffs, and ponderosa pine rise against expectation out of narrow draws. It is a place born of time and pressure, sediments of inland sea, tectonic shifts, volcanic eruptions, of wind and water tearing stone to shards, carving canyons, revealing layers of slow, steady change. It has changed me.