Aquarius Guard Station

The Aquarius Guard Station stands at the edge of a meadow at 8,700 feet, a two-room cabin with aspens and mixed conifers lining the open ground around it. Grasses, sagebrush and summer wildflowers fill the meadow, and the cabin’s front porch looks out across it. Recreation.gov, which lists the building as the Aquarius Ranger Station, gives the summer weather as warm days and cool nights. A vault toilet, a campfire circle and several picnic tables stand beside the cabin, and corrals hold saddle, draft and pack animals. In its update of September 22, 2026, the Forest Service listed the cabin closed for winter, to reopen in spring 2027.

The road south from Loa

The sources disagree on the distance from Loa. The Forest Service’s page for the cabin puts it about 15 miles south of town in one paragraph and approximately 17 miles in another. The forest’s cabin-rental page says 16. The route itself is plain. Drive south from Loa on the paved county road for 2 miles, then turn south on FR-154, the Big Rocks Road, for about 8 miles. Turn left on FR-178 for 5 miles, then left again onto the Aquarius Ranger Station Road, which runs about a quarter-mile to the cabin.

The cabin sits on the west side of Boulder Mountain, which makes up half of the Aquarius Plateau. Boulder rises to 11,317 feet, and Capitol Reef National Park lies along its eastern edge. Recreation.gov describes the mountain as more than 50,000 acres of rolling pine, spruce and aspen forest on the slopes, with broad meadows on top where the lakes lie.

Two rooms and two stoves

The cabin sleeps four, on one double bed and one set of bunk beds. No sheets or blankets are provided. The kitchen has a wood cook stove and a propane stove with an oven, along with a hot water heater, a table and chairs. The cabin has no refrigerator, and the Forest Service recommends coolers with ice. Some pots and pans, dishes and utensils are left in the cabin, though guests are encouraged to bring their own. There is no electricity, and solar lights serve the rooms. Drinking water runs inside the cabin and at a hydrant outside during the operating season of June through September.

Neither the wood stove nor the fire ring comes with firewood. The site is pack it in, pack it out, and Recreation.gov warns that the cabin “is not cleaned between user visits.” The whole complex holds up to 20 people: four inside and sixteen outside, in tents or in two or three self-contained RVs. There are no RV hookups, and the nearest dump station is in Torrey. Pets and smoking are not allowed inside the cabin, and a posted rule asks visitors not to carve names or drawings into the trees around it.

Brook trout and the Great Western Trail

Pine Creek Reservoir lies less than a mile from the cabin. It is a lake of three acres stocked with brook trout. Cook Lake, Miller Lake and a number of other fishing lakes are scattered across Boulder Top. The Great Western Trail runs alongside the station on its way of nearly 4,500 miles through five states, and hikers, horseback riders, mountain bikers and off-road riders all use it. Other trails for hiking, biking and off-road vehicles wind through the country around the cabin. In season, hunters come for black bear, mule deer, elk, grouse and antelope.

Rangers’ summers, from 1937

The Civilian Conservation Corps built the cabin in 1937. For generations afterward, Forest Service employees used it as a base for work in the surrounding back country. According to the Fishlake National Forest, its guard stations were once used only for administrative purposes. Before modern vehicles, rangers spent their summers at these cabins doing forestry, rangeland monitoring, fire weather and lookout work. The cabins and their outbuildings housed the employees, their horses and their early vehicles.

Better vehicles and improved roads let rangers reach the back country from town, and the guard stations were used less often. The Forest Service chose not to abandon them and opened them to the public through a cabin rental program. The Fremont River Ranger District, with its office at 138 South Main Street in Loa, manages Aquarius. It is one of four Fishlake guard stations that can be reserved this way. The others are Big Flat, east of Beaver, and the Gooseberry and Mt. Terrill stations, southeast of Salina.