Tips for your Visit to Arches National Park

...... I think the real title of this post is "Three Weeks. Part 3"....

So, for our three-week softball trip (See the beginnings of our trip, and Part 1 and Part 2 if you care to catch up on what happened before this) -- we actually had a spare day before heading to the Mile High City.

Last year, when we went from BYU Softball Camp to Denver, we travelled north through Park City, and across the bottom of Wyoming, then dropped down into Denver. No offense against the Wyoming-ites, but that was a pretty dull drive. [yawn] B-O-R-I-N-G. There is a whole lotta nothin' through Wyoming. So this time, with our spare day, we drove south from Provo, down to Moab, Utah -- and took the better part of a day to see Arches National Park for our first time.

Arches is really the kind of place that you probably need more than one day to experience. We weren't able to give it that kind of time, but we still got a lot out of our visit there. We learned a few lessons though, which I'm passing on to you. Just in case you were wondering.

So here are a few random tips to help you out on YOUR next visit to Arches National Park. (And a tip for the NPS, too.)

Tip 1.  Go to the visitor's center first. Before you head up the hill into the rest of the park. Sure, you could bypass it and hit it at the end of your visit, but by then you'll be tired and worn out. When at the visitor's center, be sure to read the signs:

.... which say things like, "Caution! Metal animal sculptures may be hot". And they mean it. Although it was still June, we lucked out and went to Arches on a day with triple-digit temperatures. Any imperfections in these pictures should be chalked up to heat wave distortion. Because, it was brutally hot that day!

Tip 2.  Arches National Park is not for the faint of heart. Or for the faint of lungs. Or for the faint of legs and feet. If you can't walk a ways, you will miss the best parts of this park. You cannot see it all from the air-conditioned car's windows. How much  you have to walk will vary, and it depends on how close you want to get. (More on that in a minute.) And this is not Yellowstone, with huge parking lots and highly developed areas in the park. Consider it to be very remote once you leave the Visitor's Center.

In some places, the trails are paved. Some places have stairs cut into the landscape:

And then after that, it's just you and the rocky & sandy landscape. Which brings me to tip #3:

Tip 3.  Wear the right footwear. Some of us did, and some of us didn't. Walking in sandals or flip flops was not really a good idea. On the "flip" side, I saw people who were walking in hiking boots or heavy tennis shoes, who stopped after their trail hike to empty cupfuls of all the red sand out of their socks and boots. This could be a no-win situation. 

But the view was great! (And can we say that it was kind of windy up there? Which was actually rather nice on such a hot day!)

 Tip 4. (And also my tip for the National Park Service)

Bring water. Bring water, and LOTS of it. There were a few places to refill water bottles, but the water was lukewarm. Be sure to drink A LOT. Bring a cooler packed with ice. Take water bottles for every family member with you as you hike the trails. A camelback is even better. You'll be glad you did.

And for the Park Service: PEOPLE -- If you want to seriously increase your revenues, consider installing a solar-powered vending machine that sells ice-cold bottled water, at every parking lot and bathroom stop in the entire park. People would have paid two- and three-times the going rate for bottled water that day. Alternately, you could also sell hand and body lotion too. They don't call this a desert for nothing, you know!

Tip 5. (And I'm pretty sure there's a great Sunday School object lesson out of this one)

What view you get will depend on how much you want to invest in hiking distance. The more you work for it, the better and closer you'll get. Case in point, Delicate Arch:

This is the arch that's featured on license plates in the state of Utah. It's the classic, highly-photographed arch of the park. When you go to see it, you have three options. The first is to walk 20 feet from the parking lot to a viewing area. If you look carefully (binoculars would help!), you can just barely make out the teeny tiny arch a l-o-n-g ways off. The second option is to take a moderately strenuous hike -- about 1 1/8 miles with uphill climbs -- and that's how you get the view in these pictures.

See the arch in the background between Alyssa and Todd?

(Darcie tried to get Emma to do "supergirl" with her, but Emma wouldn't bite!) By the way, Tip #5.1 would be to be sure you can either carry a toddler/preschooler, or that they can walk on their own. Strollers: don't even think about it. You're hiking in SAND in places, and climbing over rocks and such.

Anyway. If you scroll back up to look at my first picture of Delicate Arch, you can see tiny little pinpoints at its base that are actually people there.  Did you scroll yet? Ok, I'll wait right here until you do.

Ok, so those people at the base of the arch -- are the ones that did the Real Hike. That's the third option to view this arch. But it's a little over 3 miles to hike it, and on our time constraints, we were pretty sure we didn't want to be that adventurous. As it is, we took turns carrying Emma with us, who repeatedly told us that she was, "so VERY VERY hot...."!!

So, how close do you want to get?  And how badly do you want to hike there? Think about it. For us, and on that day, Option 2 was the winner. And that was partly because we also wanted to make sure to see the biggest arch in the park, Landscape Arch:

The ONLY view of Landscape Arch is to hike to it. (Unless there's some helicopter tour that I don't know about...)

Tip 6. Be aware that people come to visit from all over the country and all over the world. While we were at the base of Landscape Arch, we had a nice little chat with a couple from Germany. We saw license plates from states around the country and Canada. People bring their languages and their own ideas of appropriate behavior. Have patience with them when they do things that you might otherwise consider a bit rude.

Oh, and did I mention the sand? Emma thought it was fun to run barefoot through the warm sand:

And it really is that color, too.

Being a California kid living in the Northwest, I tend to think of landscape beauty as involving sand and sea, or mountains and trees and lakes and rivers. But going to this part of the country gives me a new perspective on what kinds of landscapes are also beautiful. This sign at the Visitor's Center kind of sums up what you'll see in Arches:

It was rugged beauty.

This is a softer beauty:

Anyway. It was pretty cool. Or in our case, ... pretty darn stinkin' hot!!

MOVING ON ............

We stayed the night in Moab, Utah, before moving forward on our trek to Denver. Alyssa is doing an online class this summer, and was trying to keep up with it while we were travelling (which actually didn't work very well).  I thought she was kind of cute to resort to using Emma's little pink headphones as she watched the online video for one of her assignments:

On Sunday, we got up and went to church with the Moabites. It's nice to know the church is the same wherever you go, and it was nice to see these welcoming people come greet us and ask if we were moving in. And I feel for them, when they said that the only creek that runs through their Girl's Camp had dried up this year -- and they asked everyone to fast and pray for moisture. Definitely a desert here.

So we left Moab, and drove I-70 to go to Denver, which was MUCH prettier than the Wyoming route. (*I'm SORRY, Wyoming!!)

I-70 takes you through the mountains, and over the Continental Divide. Well, it really takes you through the Continental Divide, because they have the very-cool Eisenhower Tunnel. And even though it's a "pass", you're still at a pretty high elevation -- like 11,158 feet. (I looked it up.) Do the math: this is over two miles high. This can do funky things to vehicle engines that are tuned for near-sea-level elevations. Our Suburban sounded like it was laboring hard in the thin air! And, there were some people pulled off the road, whose vehicles had been pushed a bit beyond their limits. And then we hit backed up traffic, with no visible reason for it. It was a pretty slow crawl.

We pulled over just on the other side of the pass, and Alyssa stretched her legs by taking a jog around the rest area:

At over TWO miles high, you can really tell that the air is thinner. But she did it!

It was a great warm-up to get acclimatized to the Denver elevation. And those biceps are real. I defy  you to catch off of her when she's pitching! Oh wait. Darcie does that all the time....