A Virtual Field Trip to Sleeping Rainbow Ranch, Capitol Reef National Park

Utah Valley University (UVU) runs a field station in the heart of Capitol Reef National Park, on a bluff above Pleasant Creek, overlooking the site of the former Sleeping Rainbow Ranch. On trips there, UVU faculty Emily Hedrick (digital media) and Amber Smith-Johnson (English) noticed that nothing told visitors about the ranch's remains: pioneer-era and early-20th-century buildings, fences and other traces of the old ranch.

Sleeping Rainbow Ranch, Capitol Reef National Park. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Documenting the ranch

With the Park Service, the park and the field station, they set out to bring digital media and English students to capture the ranch and the layered history of the Pleasant Creek area. An NPS grant approved the project in summer 2020, but COVID travel limits pushed the fieldwork to June 2021. Meanwhile, students built an interactive pamphlet, with their own photographs, timelines of the area's history and augmented reality features, documenting the site and telling its history for the first time.

Once on site, the team went further:

• Vintage Jeeps fitted with virtual reality cameras recorded rides along the back-country trails that ranch owners Lurt and Alice Knee may have driven their guests on nearly a century earlier, so someone who has never visited the Southwest can experience the landscape.
• Walking VR footage lets people virtually stroll the grounds, enter the buildings and see artefacts in 3D, augmented and virtual reality.
• A short documentary includes interviews with local author Chip Ward, who worked at the ranch in its heyday and has written widely about the area, and park superintendent Sue Fritzke.

The material is to go to Utah schools, colleges and universities, the park's visitor centre, and wherever else the park can use it.

SPARK Beacons

When the team presented to the National Park Foundation, it judged that the rich media still lacked a practical way for the Park Service to deliver it. Borrowing from a project it was testing at Timpanogos Cave National Monument, the team built a mobile web experience served by SPARK Beacons (Spatial Augmented Relay Kits): small, solar-powered computers, in effect the internet in a box, that give visitors whatever media is loaded on them. The Sleeping Rainbow Ranch tour packages the VR, AR, text, images and video as a guided field trip on any smartphone.

The Park Service must both document historic sites and protect them, and the beacons do both unobtrusively. Visitors scan a code at a trailhead or site marker and get a wealth of information with no internet connection, no cell tower and no large signs, and with fewer paper pamphlets and maps.

Beyond one ranch

What began as documentation for a single unmarked site has grown into a way to offer virtual experiences in any park, even remote ones with little or no connectivity. UVU will keep working with Capitol Reef to deploy the tour, which could lead to more "smart" trails and historic sites elsewhere.

Videos: Jeep VR sample · project overview · about Sleeping Rainbow Ranch · mobile web experience

Sources

• National Park Service, Capitol Reef National Park, "Virtual Field Trip of Sleeping Rainbow Ranch in Capitol Reef National Park," by the Utah Valley University project team. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/virtual-field-trip-of-sleeping-rainbow-ranch-in-capitol-reef-national-park.htm
• Three photographs of the project team are not reproduced here.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.