May 11-18, 2004
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May 14 continued After completing the drive in Canyonlands, we returned to Arches to walk to Delicate Arch, the famous, not-so-delicate looking arch that's on the Utah license plates.
By this time it had warmed up, and after an easy start along a dry streambed and an old homestead, we started the uphill portion of the trail. A lot of this entailed walking up this very large, smooth rock.
After walking through some wide gulleys the trail climbed again along the side of a rock ridge. Looking out from the side were more smooth rocks like this.
And this is what the trail along the ridge looks like, only Claire is walking back from Delicate Arch.
The first look at Delicate Arch.
And about a mile and a half later, you arrive at the arch.
And so begins the process of getting incrementally closer and taking more pictures.
The rock on the left is the ridge the trail comes around. Many people were sitting on the curved rim of the uprise the arch is located on.
But you can walk out to the actual arch and stand beneath it.
Or lie down.
The next walk we did was very easy by comparison. We simply walked across what passes for grassland in the desert to these large fins.
In between two of them is Sanddune Arch.
It was a lot cooler and damper inside the fins, and some pretty green bushy trees were growing there.
Since there are over a thousand arches in Arches, it's not very hard to find random arches like this. If you discover a new one, you can name it.
After Sanddune Arch we finished the Arches drive, making it all the way to the Devil's Garden, an area of even more fins and dome-like rocks you can walk among. We did a desultory little foray into them, and then, as it was getting late in the afternoon, we headed back to Moab where we'd planned to eat at Claire's favorite Moab restaurant The Moab Brewery. I also enjoyed it, as one of their micro-brewery beers was called Dead Horse Ale, named after Dead Horse Point. As Claire will tell you, I got this great T-shirt there....
May 15 After another night of camping we cruised Moab for breakfast. The morning before we'd eaten pancakes at a small breakfast joint that occupied the building that used to be the town jail. We ate at another small cafe, populated almost entirely by regulars, this time I had a waffle, and Claire had a green egg breakfast sandwich that involved, I think, pesto. Then we returned to Arches for our final hike, the Firey Furnace. This time it was guided, so we drove to the meeting point and met our guide, a perky young Portugese girl who was volunteering in the park for the summer. Not a bad life.
Firey Furnace is a jumble of rocks forming tall, narrow canyons, box canyons, and gulleys, washes, and generally neat stuff. Here Claire slips through one of the skinny canyons. We had a very good group, mainly a bunch of college-age kids on a group tour or some sort, and some plucky adults.
Claire in one of the narrowest parts.
Our group straggles down a ravine.
Claire managed to snap this picture without any people in it.
At one of the stops we were invited to slip through one of the smallest arches we'd seen, so we all lined up.
I give a cheesy smile before heading up into a crevase.
At one of the open areas we stopped for a talk about geology and the guide mentioned that this tree, a juniper, probably had to be about a thousand years old to have reached this size, and, despite its having fallen over, it was still growing.
At places you could take a peek out from the rocks and look across the desert.
After the Firey Furnace hike, we headed back out of the park, stopping to take a picture of this humorous pedestrian crossing sign.