Best of the Southwest – Canyonlands – Days 5 – Arches And Moab

It was less than an hour drive from Green River to Arches National Park via trusty US 191 with its incredible canyonlands vistas. It was going to be another hot and sunny day in paradise. In fact, a giant high pressure system was parked over the Southwest and was planning on sitting a spell. The forecast was for temps near 100 and dry sunny days for the next few weeks. This high pressure would become the reason that Hurricane Harvey stayed locked in a swirling pattern over Houston for so many days. The high pressure system we were experiencing was preventing the dangerous storm from moving north or west, and there were no steering winds to push it east. So, it just kept dumping rain on poor Houston while we broiled. Weather is an amazing beast indeed.

Arches is a hot place in summer with very little shade, so we made sure that we arrived at the park by nine and drove directly to the Delicate Arch trailhead. The Park Service has expanded the trailhead parking several times over the years, but it will never big enough and usually fills by ten, so it’s best to get an early start.

Delicate Arch is Utah’s most iconic natural feature. I mean, it’s featured on their license plates. And it is by far the most popular destination in the park. So, we fully expected to encounter a mob scene and a human train all along the 1.5-mile-long trail ( 3 miles round trip). It turned out to be all that and then some.

There were tour buses and large school groups in the parking lot and many people were waiting to use the bathrooms. The trash cans were overflowing and it had the feel of a sporting event or a rock concert.

We quickly loaded up with water and then hit the trail as fast as we could. There were some interesting stops at the beginning of the trek, like an old homestead where some crazy ass rancher had carved out a surreal existence within the rocky inferno.

And there was a nice rock art panel tucked into a Entrada Sandstone wall where desert-dwelling Native-Americans had carved pictures of people on horses and bighorn sheep.

After the first half-mile, the trail started climbing steeply toward Delicate Arch across a series of barren slickrock hills. Jimmy and I got into our death march mode and just took our time while people raced ahead of us, only to stop like panting dogs a few minutes later. Slow and steady always wins the canyonlands foot race.

The Park Service had re-routed the trail near the top since my last visit to avoid some of the fragile, black-crusted cryptogamic soils that are some of the oldest life forms on earth. As we climbed toward the summit people were stumbling along like a tired army of thirsty zombies.

There were several hundred people sitting and standing around the rim of the white and red sandstone bowl where Delicate Arch was majestically perched. Many hikers waited patiently in line to get their picture snapped while standing under the massive arch. Jimmy and I joined the queue and talked to our fellow travelers who were from all around the world. I had a very nice chat with several families from Bologna, Italy who were having trouble dealing with the intense heat.

I found a shady spot near the arch and sat there for about thirty minutes just watching the amusing parade of people. It was sort of like being in a great cathedral. People spoke in whispers and even the kids were quiet and respectful. The sacred things in life are not always man made.

The one thing that really pissed me off, and which we would encounter several more times during our trip to the Southwest, was the drone – I never could figure out who was operating the goddamn thing – that kept buzzing around the Arch like a swarm of incessant bees. Maybe it was the Parkies monitoring the scene. I don’t know. But I do know that the spiritual silence of a sacred natural wonder like Delicate Arch should never be marred by a drone. And they should be strictly outlawed – or there should at least be a hunting season on the nasty little buggers.

We spent almost three hours hiking up and back to Delicate Arch and when we returned to our car it was like an oven. The clock said it was high noon and the thermometer read 99 degrees.

The park is undergoing a multi-year construction project on the 18-mile main road through the park that involves some widening and the installation of numerous pullouts and drainage features. They don’t work on Saturdays and Sunday, so you should plan your trip so you are there on a weekend. And you should definitely check the park website before your trip to learn about the current conditions and if there any closures.

Next, we drove to the Devil’s Garden at end of the park road, a winding ribbon of asphalt that was lined with non-stop, eye-popping pinnacles and arches of red sandstone formations rising into the sky. The story of Arches is a complex tale of many chapters filled with sand dunes, salty inland seas, coastal plains, braided river systems, and swamps. The underground salt dome created by the evaporating ocean over 300 million years ago eventually punched its way to the surface and when it did, it cracked the sandstone above like the surface of freshly-baked bread which then eroded into all sorts of weird ridge lines, including arches of all shapes and sizes. We stopped at several of the new pullouts to soak in the beauty and take some pictures.

There were also short side roads that led us to scenic overlooks and quick hikes. Arches National Park has more arches than any place else on earth – at last count there were over 2,000. And they are continuously finding more.

We only had one day to spend at the park, so we headed directly to the end of the road and parked at the very busy Devil’s Garden trailhead. I had planned for us to do the long trail to some of the park’s most stupendous arches, as we had done previously. But that was not to be.

The Devil’s Garden loop trail is 7.2 miles long and takes many hours, with steep grades, intense sun exposure, and stretches of soft sand that are not fun to walk through. Jimmy was dancing on the edge of heat exhaustion, so we decided to dial it back.

It was hotter than hell and even I was feeling the heat, so we only hiked about a mile (2 miles round trip) out to Landscape Arch, the fifth largest arch in the world and the longest in Arches National Park.

Double O Arch was just a little bit farther but the trail went steeply up a sandstone ridge with narrow ledges and steep drop-offs with no shade, so we checked it out from a vantage point near Landscape Arch and then called it a day. On the way back, we checked out Tunnel Arch and Pine Tree Arch.

After returning to the trailhead we drove leisurely back to the park entrance, stopping at several sights we had missed on our way out, like Sand Dune Arch, Fiery Furnace Viewpoint, Panorama Point, Balanced Rock, and Petrified Dunes Viewpoint.

By now, it was after three and we ended our visit to Arches at the truly exceptional Visitor Center where they featured a very informative short film about the park’s weird geology, colorful exhibits about the history of the park and Grand County, a goofy sculpture of Delicate Arch, and a huge gift shop where we bought some neat trinkets for friends and family.

By the time we finished checking out the Visitor Center it was almost four o’clock and time to head to our motel in Moab and jump in the pool. The ore trucks are much noisier on the south side of Moab as they climb the long hill out of town, so we had booked a room for our four day stay on the north side of town at the Super 8 which had an amazing pool and hot tub. They also offered free Wi-Fi and a nice continental breakfast.

On the way into town we noticed a two-way paved bike trail along UT 191 running from Moab all the way to Arches that seemed quite popular, even in baking afternoon heat.

And on the north end of town we passed the mountain bike gondola which sat like a modern day ruin in the bright sun. It had been the dream of some kooky visionary to provide mountain bike access to the west rim area above Moab by building a gargantuan lift, but the crazy scheme ended in disaster because the owner dawdled too long, waited to get his final permit until the end, the City Council changed, and the new Council wouldn’t give him his last permit. He sued the city and got a $2 million award, but he had sunk over $3 million into the project and the whole thing went belly-up.

On a Steve Carr road trip there is usually only one cooked meal each day, and that’s dinner on the way from the last hike to the next town or campsite. Breakfast is the motel’s complimentary breakfast – yogurt, cereal, juice and a pastry of some sort. Lunch is nuts, fruit and Gatorade in the car between stops. And even dinner is pretty much catch-as-catch-can because most small Mormon towns don’t offer a lot of choices.

But Moab would be different. You can’t swing a cat in Moab without hitting a pretty good restaurant, and I had scoped out the best places to eat on Trip Advisor. Unfortunately, their selection of the best dinner places were super expensive and fancy-schmancy. So, we did what I recommend you do when you don’t know where to eat: ask a local. We stopped in an outdoor gear store on Main Street and asked the young clerk if there was a good place to eat nearby.

The young dude with dreads smiled and said, “Right next door. Zax has the biggest beer selection in town and they serve gorgeous pizza. I know that’s a weird word to use for a pizza, but check it out. It really is.”

And he was absolutely spot on.

We sat outside on Zax’s lovely patio that had, like most of the outdoor dining places in town, misters to cool you down. It was the perfect way to end our day of fun and exploration in Arches, and to begin our extended visit to trippy Moab.