Thursday, May 29, 2008

Double Arch, Skyline Arch and Landscape Arch




We woke up fairly early on Saturday morning and drove off to the closest gas station to get some laundry detergent ($7 for a tiny box!) I used that and more bleach and got all of the red out of Melanie (and some of Dan’s) clothes. Unfortunately this time the bleach also got onto the jeans and faded some clothes, but they weren’t RED anymore! Too bad I can’t say the same for the back seat of the car! Dan is not happy with me for that! Hopefully a good detail job will do the trick for that one! (Or else I’m on his sh** list forever!)

After everyone was dressed and fed, we packed up our hiking boots and headed off to Arch’s NP! Moira and the girls were so impressed with the beauty of the red rocks in the desert! Our first stop was Balanced Rock (picture from first post)! We took the short walk around the rock and got some great views of the landscape surrounding it. Then it was off to The Windows section.

At the Windows, we first climbed up to Double Arch (shown here). This arch was featured in one of the Indian Jones movies years ago! We had never hiked up to it and was thrilled we could climb right up into it! Yes, I said I climbed right up into it – brace and all! The view to the backside was awesome and we all loved the rock scrambling!!! Then we moved on to Turret Arch and then the Window’s. The primitive trail behind the Windows was very empty, which was wonderful for such a busy holiday weekend! We got to see a few lizards along the path and admire the formations in a distance!

Out next stop was to show Moira the campground (and cry we didn’t get in there) and the Skyline Arch (2nd photo). This arch is the backdrop to their outdoor theater where they do campfire programs – it is absolutely beautiful! The kids had a lot of fun climbing around on that arch too!

Our last stop for the day was to hike around Devils’ Garden (nice name, huh) near the campground! On this hike, we saw several more impressive arches as well as the very famous Landscape Arch (last photo)! They say an engineer wouldn’t be able to duplicate this arch if they had all the right tools!!! It is so cool! We could have gone further, but everyone was tired, including me who had logged about 6 miles on my knee that day! So we headed back to camp.

Friends of Dan’s from work were also in Moab and they joined us for dinner and s’mores! It was a ton of fun having Tammi and Nestor with us! The kids really liked them too, which was great! After they left around 10, the campground continued to buzz with noise! No respect in these commercial campgrounds is there?

1 comment:

toners said...

Sounds like a great day! And don't worry about the car - it's just a car :) (not sure my hubby would agree with me, but that's how I feel, anyway! LOL!)