MarknRobin Making Memories: Arches National Park

This is our fifth post from Utah! If you have signed up for email notifications but have not received one for each post (which seems to be happening for some reason), you can go directly to the blog at marknrobinmemories.blogspot.com if you are interested. Individual Utah posts are listed along the right hand side under 2017. We were told by a park ranger that Arches National Park is very busy and we should plan on being there at 7:00am when the gates open if we wanted to make sure to beat the crowds. He also told us the best strategy for seeing everything (and avoid problems with parking) is to drive straight through to the furthest point in the park and work our way from the north to the south. So that's what we did and it worked pretty well for us. We only had trouble finding a parking place the last couple of stops we made later in the afternoon. At that point there would be a line of vehicles waiting for the next parking space to open up. It went fairly quickly though. We drove there in the darkness (9/28) and enjoyed the sun rise on our way through the park.

We did a LOT of hiking today. More than we expected to do, in fact. We hiked in to see Landscape Arch and saw Pinetree and Tunnel Arches along the way. Two of the other arches we saw in the northern part of the park were Skyline Arch and Sand Dune Arch.

Hmmmmm . . . This was either Tunnel Arch or Pinetree Arch

Landscape Arch

Skyline Arch

Sand Dune Arch

The highlight of the day was Delicate Arch. To view Delicate Arch, you can go on a shorter hike to view it from a distance OR you can go on a long, strenuous hike to view it up close and personal. We were not intending to go on the STRENUOUS hike, however we accidentally got on the wrong path and didn't realize our mistake until we had gone quite a ways and it started to get a lot more difficult. There were many people on the path and those returning encouraged us to continue saying it was long and hard but definitely worth it. It was all uphill (elevation gains of 480 feet) but we rested frequently and it WAS worth the hike. The arch was quite magnificent and there were a lot of people up there enjoying the view. Afterwards we went to the overlook to see it from a distance. I'm so glad we took the wrong path by mistake and definitely recommend hiking up to the arch.

Hiking to Delicate Arch

The parking lot is at the base of the light green rock in the distance.

Nearly there! Almost to Delicate Arch!

Delicate Arch

At one of the overlooks in the park we saw a couple climbing to the top of one of the tall rock formations. In the Windows Section of the park there was a very cool Double Arch as well as the Turret Arch and the North and South Windows. At the end of the day we took the primitive trail around and behind the North and South Windows which was longer than we expected but we were glad we did it.