Today, the remnants of Sleeping Rainbow Ranch lay peacefully in the beautiful region south of Pleasant Creek. A secret basin parallel to the Waterpocket Fold and hidden among striking cliffs and red rock structures, the area surrounding the ranch is one of Capitol Reef's many hidden gems. To visit the valley where the ranch resides is to take the road less traveled. While paths on the way are marked and recognizable, they are rocky and unpaved, retaining a quality of being captured in another place and time. Today, in a state of dilapidation, Sleeping Rainbow Ranch presents itself as a chapter in the long history of the Capitol Reef landscape.

When Lurt Knee left his childhood town of Van Eyues for Monument Valley in Capitol Reef, he already had big dreams. All he needed was to find the ideal location to fulfill them. Perhaps Lurt was lucky when his car broke down beside a quiet ranch just south of Pleasant Creek in 1938. Immediately, Lurt knew he had discovered the perfect place. He had found his home.

For over thirty years, Lurt and his first wife Margaret, and later his wife Alice operated a guest ranch beside Pleasant Creek along the Waterpocket Fold. Sleeping Rainbow Ranch was a place of solace for tourists and adventurers alike and was particularly popular among artists and poets. From providing lodging to offering jeep tours and horseback rides, Lurt and Alice Knee dedicated their lives to sharing the natural wonder of the Utah desert with those hoping to connect to it. After the guest ranch closed in 1974, the couple willingly sold the property to the National Park Service. Lurt and Alice were able to grow old together in the serene area they had come to recognize as home.

The road through the heart of Capitol Reef is hidden from the rest of the world. On either side are massive walls of red rock and sandstone as it winds through rugged landscape. From here, Capitol Reef's defining feature is visible: a geographical phenomenon unique to this region called the Waterpocket Fold. Almost 100 miles long, the Waterpocket Fold is a wrinkle in the earth's crust. Between 50 to 70 million years ago, the Waterpocket Fold formed when a fault line below it shifted, causing overlying rock layers to fold across it. This overlap resulted in a steep monocline (a step-like fold in rock layers) almost 7000 feet higher on the west side than the east. The earth’s shifting crust and later erosion has exposed layers of rock that today act as a visual feature of our planet's topography you can only experience at Capitol Reef.

The area surrounding Pleasant Creek and Sleeping Rainbow Ranch has a rich and extensive history. In 500 CE the Fremont Culture is the first ancient civilization that is known to have settled along the Waterpocket Fold rather than migrate with the seasons. Fremont is the name given to this culture because we do not know what this ancient group called themselves. Historians hypothesize that they were the most powerful group of people in ancient Utah at the time. Later, the Paiute tribe lived in the area from around 1600-1800 and are the first historically recognizable group in the area since the Fremont people. The time gap between these two groups may be due to a major drought that afflicted the area, forcing inhabitants to move elsewhere. As the Paiutes settled, additional tribes moved in and around the region including Ute, Hopi, Navajo, and Zuni. However, the Paiute tribe were the most consistent residents over the years, leaving behind a good deal of evidence such as petroglyphs and artifacts.