The sky was beautiful and clear today, great for our drive to Arches National Park. We stopped first this morning at the viewpoint for the appropriately named Big Mesa, which is a very long mesa beside the highway we drive towards Moab. Then we continued on into the National Park, and drove up towards the beautiful red sandstone cliffs standing tall against a deep blue sky.
The Three Gossips
There are many tall pinnacles in the first part of the park. I particularly enjoyed “The Three Gossips”. A little farther on is “Balanced Rock”, and then the highlight of our day, “Delicate Arch”.
We first took the easy route to the lower viewpoints. This is not a very long walk, but it also only gives a very distant view of the arch. After lunch, which we ate in the shade of a small bush beside the very full parking lot, we climbed the two kilometre walk up to the much better viewpoint for Delicate Arch. A lot of it is a climb up a slope of slickrock. The last little bit winds around the backside of a rock where they have cut a trail about a metre wide that drops off sharply on the outside edge.
Delicate Arch
This is the most famous of all the Utah arches, and is the one they have on their license plate. It was hard to get a good picture of the arch, as there were so many people there taking their picture against the arch. Finally, after waiting my turn, and asking some people to move, I got a good picture.
We finished early today, drove back to Moab to get some groceries, and then stopped to get propane on the way back. One of our tanks ran dry right at breakfast this morning, which was good timing or the refrigerator would have been off all day. We decided that we will go back to Arches National Park tomorrow, our last day in this area before we go to the Needles section of Canyonlands National Park.