Arches National Park

It's May 5 - the day before Matthew's 10th birthday and he's as excited as can be.  We're in northern New Mexico now, slowly headed home, and I need to catch up a little on the blog.

After Bryce Canyon National Park we drove across southern Utah to Moab, a little town I'll talk more about in the next post.  There were some interesting things about the drive.  We drove north from Bryce along a very pretty valley along the Sevier River.  It turns out there are lots of outdoor activities on this river for locals and tourists - things like rafting, fishing, off-road riding, and so on.  We joined interstate 70 (the same one that goes through Columbus) at mile marker 12 - it starts just to the west of where we joined.  Driving across 70 was quite an experience.  This part of southern Utah is very geographically diverse, with desert, plateaus, and deep canyons.  There was a huge uplift (or something) along the way.  Oh, there were also signs saying no services for 100 miles.  Later I read in Wikipedia that this stretch of 70 is the least-serviced in the entire length of the highway! 

Here's the uplift.  Building a road through this proves the government can do pretty much anything it sets its mind to... (sometimes good, sometimes not so good...)

Moab was our base of operations for the next three or so days as we visited local national parks.  First was Arches NP.  There are over 2,000 arches in the park.  They were formed by a unique combination of geological events hundreds of millions years ago as well as more "recent" events of 10 million years.  Many of the formations have names.  Here is Balanced Rock

 If you look closely you can see two men climbing at the point where the rock touches the base.  This gives you an idea of the scale.  This one is Tower Arch.

 This is Double Arch.

At about this time we had some back luck with weather - light rain.  We decided to leave the park and drive along the Colorado River just north of Moab.  The rain stopped and we had some fantastic scenery.

 Awesome, awesome, awesome.  Words just cannot describe this.

We were amazed by the 300 to 500 foot cliff walls along the river.  There were also boaters.  The river has a mixture of slow water and small white water at this point.

At this point the skies really opened up with rain.  We had a very hard shower for 10 minutes or so.  As we drove back to Moab we noticed waterfalls from the tops of the cliffs.  These were spectacular.  In this one you can see cars at the bottom of the waterfall.

The next day the weather was good and we had another go at Arches.  We hiked up to Delicate Arch. This is an iconic image for Utah - it's on their license plates.  We had to hike about a mile to get to the arch.

 This is the arch as seen by looking through another arch!

 Beth did some Photoshop work on this to remove all the people around it.  It was a very popular place!  You can see the snow-covered La Sal mountains in the background.

 No Photoshop on this one.  People all over the place!

We also did some other hiking.

 These petroglyphs were along the way to Delicate Arch.

This is Landscape Arch.  It's the longest (300 feet) in the US.  About 10 years ago some visitors were filming the arch when a 60 foot chunk fell.  No one was hurt and the event was captured on video.  The trail no longer goes under the arch!

 Another view of Balanced Rock, just because it's so amazing.

Matthew got a Junior Ranger badge (about number 36 or so for him).  The next day we went to Canyonlands NP and Dead Horse Point State Park, but we'll save that for another post.