Finding Arches around Moab

Our Moab adventure started a little bit on a whim, somewhat similar to our Zion trip a couple years ago. Perhaps not surprisingly, we chose Moab as the target of that whim for many of the same reasons (cold enough to keep some people away but not too cold, beautiful place worth visiting) and some new ones (mainly that it seemed like a fairly covid-friendly mini vacation and was within driving distance).

After driving for a good part of the day, we got into town and decided to head up into the park for a quick pre-sunset desert stroll down Park avenue. It ended up being a pleasant intro to the types of scenery we’d find over the next few days. Also, perhaps given the day of week or end-of-day timing, there were fairly few people there–a couple moments we even felt like we had the whole place to ourselves.

The following day we got up early to visit Delicate Arch for sunrise. If you’ve seen any Utah travel-focused promotional material, you’ve likely seen some version of this formation. It has a prominent location on top of a big curving rock amphitheater area, and is an uncommon site to say the least. The hike up to it is pleasant as well. We spent some time taking photos and wandering around / under the arch, and then as more folks started to show up we descended back down to the car.

Next we went over to the Devil’s Garden area and meandered down a looping trail that visits a variety of arches and other rock features. Some arches along this route, e.g. Landscape arch, are fairly well known. For the most part the more well known ones are closer to the parking lot. Getting further out into the desert we found some of the lesser known but still super interesting formations. One “arch” was actually two arches stacked on top of one another! Elisse also found the world’s smallest cairn.  : )

On Day 3 we drove into Canyonlands National Park. I hadn’t realized this prior to visiting, but a lot of the park is actually a large flat(ish) plateau sitting in between the Green River and the Colorado River. The park also includes some non-plateau areas around the rivers, as well as some segments of the rivers themselves. We ended up with amazing views down over those other parts, so our one-day park exploration seemed like a great starting point. We visited Upheaval Dome – which looks somewhat like a big white mountain decided to grow out of a big red crater – and also Grand Point, to look down over the conflux of the two rivers.

Our penultimate day included medium length hikes to Corona arch and Hidden valley. Corona was another early morning start, which meant there were only one or two other groups out there for the first half of the hike. We walked up and across beautiful orange / yellow rocky terrain, up some ladders, around some big almost-cliffs (they curved downwards until things really got serious) and eventually made it to maybe the most dramatic arch of the trip. We also visited Pinto arch, notable because it’s a sinkhole arch (real scientific name unknown, but I suspect it’s a thing..). i.e. water was pooling on the surface of a flat rock face, eventually turning a puddle into a depression into a pool – then eventually that pool grew deep enough to cause the rock on an adjacent vertical face to collapse and create an ‘arch’ of sorts.

As we headed home the next day, we visited the Fisher Towers on our way back to Colorado. The route took us towards and around very large towers that look like dried stacks of mud. Some of the towers could definitely be accurately described as spires. And some bold rock climbers were making it all the way up to the top of even the most spire-y of them. We enjoyed watching them for a bit, as well as watching the color of the rocks change from early into mid morning.

Really this trip only had one small downside – the dining options in town were pretty limited. We did a fair amount of hanging out in our hotel room with takeout in the evenings. Which, all things considered, was actually ok because we were pretty tired : ). So overall, definitely a worthwhile trip that turned out to be quite covid-friendly!