It’s been over a week since we finished the road trip with our last day through Arches NP, and I haven’t had a chance to write about it until now so we’ll see how much I can recall.

We woke up for sunrise, finally! The sky gradually changed through a wonderful range of colors as we broke camp and made breakfast. Eventually the north side of the canyon got hit and things became much brighter. Our final breakfast of eggs and bacon was delicious and things seemed to be going pretty smoothly. We left a note for the people that let us share their campsite (if you’re reading this, thank you again!!!), if it weren’t for them, we would have had to keep driving 10-15 miles up the road and we still might not have found anything.

We headed into Arches around 9 and there was a line of cars waiting to get into the park. Apparently this is standard on a weekday. The only other place I’ve seen a line of cars at the entrance station was at Rocky Mountain NP. No wonder the campground was full!

Anyway, we headed to the visitor center before going up into the park to get our stamps and patch (and brush our teeth). Robert found his victory hat, which was the only non-weird or park specific NPS centennial hat we had found on the trip. It was perfect since this was our last NP for the year.

Arches NP is on an awesome plateau above Moab canyon. The lighting was weirdly dramatic since it was still morning and a lot of things were in shadow, it was amazing. It reminded me of ancient ruins, the shapes seem unnatural and are so awe-inspiring. Per the ranger’s recommendation, we headed to Devil’s Garden to hike around the loop (with the primitive trail section). There were a decent number of people, but we found parking easily and headed in.

The first stop was Landscape arch, which used to have a trail going up and under it, but in the 90s, a large chunk of the rock came crashing down. Fortunately no one was hurt, but people had been under the arch and could have gotten seriously injured, so the closed that trail and you have to just look from afar.

After that, we started climbing up one of the “fins” (if you look at the pictures, you’ll understand), which was fun and the views along the top were great. [insert picturrres]

We went on a couple little spur trails to check out Navajo and Partition arches on the way. Double-O arch was cool and the Dark Angel was somewhat reminiscent of an angel statue, although I didn’t think it was all that similar.

I spent most of the hike remembering why I love the desert. It’s just so freaking cool! Especially when water comes in to carve through softer rock and make these awesome formations. Cryptobiotic soil grows a millimeter per year and looks like little cityscapes. It’s not just a flat wasteland, it’s full of amazing things.

We had a good time climbing around in Devil’s Garden, we showed some older folks how to get around a puddle of water by climbing on the rock around it. It got pretty warm by the time we were on our way out around 2 or 3 pm (people were going in at that time…) so we skipped the last two arches on the developed trail since we were tired and wanted to get going. As it was, we took another hour to get out of the park and didn’t make it into the Rockies before sunset (much to my dismay).

The day sort of got away from me in that I didn’t have a lot of time for reflection, and I certainly didn’t have time in the days following. It was quite a trip. We saw a lot of things. We skipped a lot of things. We learned a lot about ourselves and our relationship, and we’re still realizing and reflecting more than a week later.

Thanks for following us through this adventure! We’ll keep using this blog to post more adventures, although they may be more mundane (like our adventure to find a place to live), but stay tuned!