Arches National Park

Continuing my backblips

September 22
After failing to get into the Park yesterday afternoon, we got an early start this morning, and after a good breakfast at the hotel, were in the Park by 8.45am. With a total of over 2,000 arches of differing sizes within its 76,518 acres, Arches National Park contains the world’s largest concentration of natural sandstone arches. In addition to it as arches, the park also contains an amazing variety of other geological formations, huge sandstone fins, massive balanced rocks, soaring pinnacles and stone spires dwarf the visitor. The first area we explored was the Park Avenue trail, including Courthouse Rock and the Three Gossips. Then we continued to do the trail to Delicate Arch (top left) before the parking filled up. The trail is three miles round trip and climbs 450 feet, the last section up bare rock to the beautifully carved arch. On the way, you can take a short detour to view a wall of Ute petroglyphs. Some of the other arches we visited were Landscape Arch (centre left), Skyline Arch ( second from top right hand column) and Broken Arch below that, which isn’t in fact broken, but has a crack in the centre. The day was largely cloudy, and we even had a little drizzle in the afternoon, though with occasional partial clearing, especially late afternoon, leading to some great light effects, as in the lower right, where the sunshine was illuminating the rocks around us, while the dark rain clouds were in the background. In total, we did a total of over 30,000 steps that day, so once back at the hotel, we had a quick freshen up before going out for a pizza, then we were ready for bed!