I’m continuing my quest to check off every National Park within driving distance of Flagstaff.
My friend Sara (who I met at the Trib) came to visit last week, and we took Presidents’ Day Weekend as an opportunity to book a hotel in Moab and spend two days hiking through both Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park.
I’m gonna split this into two different posts, so today I’ll start with Arches!
We were kind of bummed with the weather forecast. We’d planned to drive Saturday morning, get there Saturday afternoon and hike Arches. But… it was rainy. So we got to Moab a little later than we’d planned to, checked into our hotel room and grabbed dinner and beer at Moab Brewery.
After that, we drove through Arches and kind of explored? But it was raining and neither of us was fully dressed for hiking, so after checking out the Skyline Arch (…which was like, a quarter of a mile) we were pretty quick to call it an early night and spend the rest of the evening bumming around in our hotel room.
The weather was a lot better Sunday morning, so we drove straight to Arches to explore.
I let Sara pick the hikes for the day, so we started with Delicate Arch, which is the suuuuper touristy attraction you’ve probably seen before. It’s on Utah’s license plates and everything.
This was the busiest trail of the entire weekend. The hike itself is about three miles out-and-back and it’s uphill on the way to the arch. There were surprisingly a TON of people on the hike despite the fact that it was 20 degrees (with a “feels like” of 10, due to the biting wind) the entire day.
I was actually surprised at how many people did the hike in street clothes. There were women in Hunter rain boots and high heeled combat boots and I could not imagine doing it in anything other than my hiking boots.
Delicate Arch is definitely worth the hype, though. The trail itself is really pretty, and Delicate Arch is pretty impressive up close. It’s massive!
After that, we did a few more shorter hikes through Arches. We did The Windows, which wasn’t really a hike so much as a casual jaunt to look at some rock formations.
Our last hike was Park Avenue, which was a pretty easy two-mile out-and-back hike near the front of the park.
I also couldn’t get over the La Sal Mountains. We couldn’t see them when we first got to Moab because of the clouds and rain, so seeing them Sunday morning was amazing.
After our Arches trip, we grabbed coffee, went back to our hotel to nap and then went to get dinner and beer at The Spoke on Center.
We called it a night pretty early because we wanted to wake up early enough to get to Canyonlands at a reasonable hour.
Anyway, that’s all for now. Til tomorrow!
