We woke up to cool, cloudy day. Although the grey clouds are disappointing for photography, it does make excellent hiking weather. After a short stop at Arches National Park visitor’s center, we went directly to the Delicate arch. With the anticipation of rain, we wanted to make sure we were did the longest and most famous hike of the park first.
The hike to the Delicate Arch is a 3 mile hike with a portion of the trail up a steep steady incline over slick rock. As we were hiking along the trail we could see the slickrock in the distance and the people on the trail looked like an ant trail. I don’t know how many times that I commented that it was a good thing that the sun was not out in full force. After an hour of hiking we reached the arch. We sat and enjoyed the views for a few minutes, then felt the start of a few light rain drops. The Wilwert family decided to head right back and Tom and I lingered for about 20 minutes longer to capture pictures. I wanted to get one at the base of the arch, but as we had been setting up a camera a group of girls from a church group decided to take up residence under the arch. We waited for several minutes to see if they would move. After being patient for as long as I could I finally went over to the girls and kindly asked them if they would mind getting out of everybody’s photo. They quickly got up and moved and we got a picture (although another part of their group was still hanging out relativity close). We took our pictures and moved back away from the arch and observed this group of high school aged kids get bigger and louder. We found them to be super irritating as the whole group paid no attention to those around them and the adults with them seemingly had no control. After discussing the annoying group with a few people around us, we took a couple more pictures and started the hike back. We caught up with the Wilwerts at an offshoot near the end of the trail that took us past a petroglyph. It was a long hike, but so worth it, and thankfully it never really rained.
The long hike made us all ready for lunch so we proceeded to a picnic area and ate a super sub that we bought at the grocery store the night before. With our bellys full we were ready to hike again. The next hike took us by three more arches to include landscape arch, which is the longest arch in the park. The total distance of the hike was 1.6 miles. Onto the next hike!
The next hike was recommended by the Forest Ranger at the visitor center and consisted of Sand Dune arch and Broken arch. The Sand Dune arch was a quick .2 mile hike. This arch was interesting because the surrounding area was all soft sand (hence the name of the arch). After leaving the arch we continued on a sandy trail to the Broken arch. The arch isn’t really broken, but appears so because of a crack in it. I really enjoyed this flat hike as the trail was pretty empty of people and it felt like a quick walk even though the total was 1.6 miles.
Once again the day was slipping by and knew we only had time for one more short hike. The kids picked the Double arch over the Windows arches (mostly because it was only .6 miles versus 1 mile). We really enjoyed this arch and Sean had fun climbing up as far as he could.
By now it was 4:00p.m. and with a 2 hour drive ahead of us, it was time to leave Arches National Park. We stopped at the visitor center for bathrooms and visit to the gift shop, and then got back on the road. Tom W was behind the wheel for this leg of the journey. As we were driving we could see rain and lightening in the distance. Before too long we were hitting the rain and at one point Tom had to pull over because the rain was coming down so hard. It has been a long time since I had seen it rain that hard. After the short delay, we were back on the road to our hotel in Richfield, UT. We rolled into around 7:30 and at Beth’s request we had Chinese food for dinner. We got back to the hotel in time for the kids to take advantage of the indoor heated pool. All in all I really enjoyed Arches National Park and would go back to this park again.
