Westacular

This morning we left Moab for Colorado, but we stopped along the way at Arches National Park.

Arches is beautiful.  It is similar to Monument Valley, but different enough to make it worth the visit.  One difference is that since Arches is a National Park visitors have much more access to the rocks.  At Monument Valley we weren’t allowed to go off the beaten path, but at Arches we could park the car then walk up close and climb on the rocks.  Certainly this could be at someone’s peril, as there are plenty of dangerous places to go, but that’s part of the fun.

Arches is also inexpensive to visit, $10 for our carload.

Arches is also in Moab, which appears to be a paradise for anyone with desires for Jeeping, mountain biking or river rafting.  It is a beautiful area.

Oh, another difference betwen Arches National Park and Monument Valley is that while Monument Valley is viewed from a dusty dirt road, Arches is nicely paved.

There are, of course, arches.

We stopped at Double Arch and walked over to climb into it.

As we walked on the trail, Sarah Michael noticed that her voice echoed off the rock walls, this amused her.  So we make loud noises to hear them come back to us, I’m not sure the foreign tourists appreciated this.

Climbing on the rocks isn’t especially difficult, but you must pay attention.  It is steepish but there are plenty of bits to put your toes and fingers onto.  The last bit of the climb to get up into the smaller archway was the most difficult so I basically held Sarah Michael up as she found footholds to use.  It was fun, though, and made me wish for more time in Arches so we could explore and climb more.

Alas we didn’t visit very much of the park, it was already 11am and we knew we had a long drive ahead to get us to our next campground in Longmont, Colorado.

So off we went.  Southern Utah is really something, I look forward to returning to see more.

Have you ever noticed that Utah license plates don’t say “Utah”, instead they say “Utah!”?  I’m starting to see why, there is some amazing stuff to see here and we haven’t even gone off the highway yet.

After going through Mexican Hat, UT which is named for a rock formation that looks sombrero-ish, the red rock whose dust we’ve been breathing for the last few hours is gone and the geology has been replaced by something entirely different.

Then you’ll go up a canyon and then down into another that looks different again.  The topology, geology, geography or whatever is constantly changing and is good fun to look at.  The rocks some in some pretty neat shapes too, and right next to the highway!

We passed a lot we wished we could have seen, Needles, Natural Bridges, Valley of the Gods.  Plus I see all kinds of roads with Jeeping potential.  We are definitely coming back.

We decided to bail on Four Corners, we’ll save that for a future visit when we can see southwest Colorado and a time when Sarah Michael finds all this stuff more interesting.

We were about to drop down a steep grade on the highway when we were stopped by the Highway Patrol.  They were closing north-bound traffic while they let south-bound traffic use our lane on the grade to get past a slow-moving wide load.  We only had to wait about ten minutes but we were sure curious what the fuss was about.  I don’t know what that truck was hauling, but it was enormous.

About 30 minutes south of Moab we drove up on Wilson Arch and stopped to have a closer look.  How can stuff this amazing be so accessible?

You can climb right up into the hole in the rock, which we did. It is so beautiful!

We finally arrived into Moab at 7:30 and got into our RV park.  This is a beauitful area, I’m sad we can’t spend more time here this trip, but knowing we’ll come back and we have so much to look forward to is quite a comfort.