2000+ Arches – September 27-29, 2021

It’s over 700 miles from Yosemite to Arches National Park, so we planned a stop in St George, Utah to break it up, an stayed long enough to eat dinner and sleep. The landscape driving from St. George was incredible and changed several times along the way.

Unlike the drive from Vegas to California where it looks the same most of the way, there were spectacular mountains of red sandstone, low desert areas, green mountainous areas and just lots of variety. We arrived in Moab early enough on the 28th to go into Arches mid afternoon and get to see the overall layout of the park and make a plan. Our Senior pass made entry free so it didn’t matter how long we stayed. We decided on a plan of attack and then we checked the weather (guess we did it backwards) only to find out tomorrow was going to be a washout with rain all day.

Time for Plan B. It turned cold (58 degrees) at night and the rain started around 4 a.m. but by 8 a.m. it was mostly gone so back to Plan A and off to Arches National Park. The Park touts over 2,000 arches and is divided into three sections taking in about 35 of the most interesting with hikes varying from easy to difficult. Of course, we were only considering the easy hikes knowing full well there would be some we couldn’t do. Here are pictures of what we saw:

One of the last arches we saw was Landscape Arch which is the longest in the park. In 1991 some hikers were resting under it and heard some crackling which was they thought was thunder. Turned out to be rock breaking away from the arch causing it to get even thinner. Eventually this will happen to all the arches and they will become U-shaped.

When all was said and done, we had walked 9.5 miles and had over 24,000 steps. Actually I wimped out before we saw the last arch on the plan. With all this hiking, we noticed some vegetation that looked almost artificial like something you would buy at Hobby Lobby. Any idea what it turned out to be?