ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Capitol Reef National Park's historic orchards are pretty special. In the Utah park, you can find heirloom fruit varieties planted by pioneers, and they're more than just fun to look at. They could be a type of climate insurance for the food system. But old trees are dying, and new ones are getting harder to find. David Condos of member station KUER reports.
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DAVID CONDOS, BYLINE: Capitol Reef is a mostly unforgiving, rocky, desert landscape, but its orchards sit in a lush green valley - a meandering oasis that follows the path of the Fremont River. The park's Shauna Cotrell wades through waist-high grass in the shade of a giant apricot tree.
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CONDOS: Yeah. These are them.
SHAUNA COTRELL: Yeah.
CONDOS: I didn't realize.
COTRELL: These are them - yeah, yeah.
CONDOS: OK.
COTRELL: And they're fuzzy (laughter).
CONDOS: This tree, planted by a Mormon pioneer family, is nearly a century old. Today, the park manages roughly 2,000 fruit trees across a dozen species. And last year visitors picked literal tons of fruit.
COTRELL: Yeah, this is one of the older trees.
CONDOS: But many trees here are nearing the end of their lifespans, and these specific heirloom varieties have become rare. For some, like the park's namesake red apple, these orchards might be their last hope.
COTRELL: If we lose the Capitol Reef Red here, it's gone. There are very few places that it exists.
CONDOS: So Capitol Reef is in the middle of a major replanting project, adding around 700 new trees since 2022. But bringing heirloom fruits back from the brink is not easy work. Park staff have to become history detectives, identifying which fruit varieties settlers planted here decades ago. Then they have to find living specimens, if they still exist, and get them to grow here again. And there's an urgent reason to preserve as many heirloom fruits as possible, says Todd Little-Siebold, a fruit historian with the College of the Atlantic in Maine. Having more varieties makes our food system less vulnerable to future diseases and climate extremes.
TODD LITTLE-SIEBOLD: We need apples that are able to tolerate these broad swings - the extremes that we haven't seen. Particularly with the threats of climate change, I think we don't know what will grow in the future.
CONDOS: Weather data shows the park's average March temperatures over the past decade are nearly two degrees warmer than they were in the 1940s. Park Superintendent Cass Bromley says small changes can add up.
CASS BROMLEY: Climate change isn't occurring in a vacuum. It's one more stressor. So if the trees aren't healthy because the climate has shifted a little bit and they're not quite getting what they need, then they're more vulnerable.
CONDOS: One thing they're studying is if the trees are blooming earlier. That could lead to a timing mismatch with pollinators, like this bee along the edge of the orchard.
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CONDOS: And more intense rainstorms could increase erosion and flooding along the orchard's river corridor.
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CONDOS: But so far, Capitol Reef's replanting project is showing promise. Shauna Cotrell walks past rows of baby trees, just a few feet tall. Some varieties, like the Lambert cherry, once grew here. Now, it's back.
COTRELL: You want me to try one?
CONDOS: Go on.
COTRELL: OK. It's a little tart.
CONDOS: Juicy, though.
COTRELL: Very juicy, very yummy.
CONDOS: In this one orchard alone, park staff have planted more than a dozen types of cherry and apple trees, including some new Capitol Reef Reds.
COTRELL: This one's more ripe.
CONDOS: And with more than one million people visiting each year, the park hopes this new generation of trees will have plenty of chances to share how important historic varieties are to the future of fruit. For NPR News, I'm David Condos in Capitol Reef National Park.
(SOUNDBITE OF SHYGIRL SONG, "HEAVEN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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