Today was our second day in Moab. We woke up and headed across the street to the Moab Diner & Ice Cream Shoppe for breakfast, since Ramada is not on board the free breakfast train. To their credit, the newly remodeled rooms have fabulous showers. The beauty of diner breakfast is never-ending coffee refills. From there, we headed to the grocery store to pick up some stuff for sandwiches for our hike.
We headed out to Arches, which is only about ten minutes from our hotel. Arches is basically made up of over 2,000 sandstone arches formed naturally, as well as many other rock formations, some millions of years old. We had a few options in mind for how we wanted to spend our day, so we met with a trusty park ranger to decide what would be best. We must have some sort of look about us that makes these people think we are regularly physically active, because, as usual, we were told we should have no problem with the moderate/difficult long trails. She suggested two different options, so we chose the shorter one...3 miles round trip, but with an elevation change of about 850 feet.
We drove about 15 miles out into the park to arrive at the Delicate Arch trail head. The first stop is the home of a farmer that moved with his wife to the remote area and built the house after fighting in the Civil War. From there, the trail leads to some petroglyphs, believed to have been left by Ute Indians. Then it's on to the bulk of the trail. It varies from gravel and sand trails, to wide open expanses of slick rock, with trails marked only by rock cairns. It took some adjusting to get used to breathing the thin air again, but once we did, we were fine. The views are incredible the entire time, but the last portion takes you along the ledge of a tall sandstone wall and when you come to the end and turn the corner, you see Delicate Arch, red sandstone against a clear blue sky...Colorado claimed to have a sky 10% bluer than the rest of the country, but I think Utah has them beat. We tried to get as close as possible, but it sits on a ledge and there are a bunch of arch hogs taking their sweet time with photos, so we did what we could ("arch hog" is actually a term used by the park to encourage people to move along, so people can get photos without you in them...I didn't make it up, unfortunately.)
We were feeling pretty good after the hike, but decided to play it safe from there, so we chose to do the 1.6 mile Landscape Arch Trail, part of Devils Garden. It included turnoffs to see two additional arches, Pine Tree and Tunnel. The crazy thing about Landscape Arch is that the trail used to be much longer and visitors used to be able to get much closer...even hang out underneath the arch, as with Delicate Arch. However, in 1991, while visitors were lounging around, a massive piece of the arch fell...no one was hurt, but the area has been closed off since. Seeing these formations, it's really hard to believe many of them are still in tact, especially the balancing rocks.
After this trail, we stopped at a picnic area for lunch and then decided to drive to all the major arch viewpoints, as we headed back towards the park entrance. Some of our favorites are in the collage: Double Arch, Balanced Rock, Parade of Elephants and Park Avenue. We even saw some crazy rock climbers.
We headed back to the hotel around 5:00 and checked out places for dinner. We decided to just walk around town and see what was near us - we found Zax Pizza and Watering Hole. They had pretty decent brick-oven pizza and root beer and mediocre steak. We got a giant homemade cookie a la mode to go and headed back to our room. Tomorrow we leave for Park City.
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