Arches National Park

I promised a while back to write about our trip to Arches National Park. We decided to drive down to Moab and visit the park earlier in the weekend. It was a beautiful day - chilly, yet sunny. We got into the park around noon and began our adventure ...

It began innocent enough with the mandatory picture at the sign.

And taking roadside pix.

We then decide to stop at Balanced Rock and try to take some self portraits ... but we're so tiny!

Then we stop at the double arches and take some goofy pictures. I'm so clever!

At the same double arches stop is this treacherous bit of hiking ... very slick but no falls.

To avoid going down this hillside skating rink, we decide to go around the double window arches on the primitive trail. Mind you we're not prepared. We both have on heavy coats, but we're not in hiking gear. I have on rubber soled ballet flats ...

It starts out well with spectacular views we wouldn't have seen otherwise. We continue to follow the snow tracks, but we're not sure if we're on the trail or not. We get to a point where we need to either go over these arches, go back the way we came or go over and around steep cliffs. My vote was to go back the way we came.... about a mile or so back ... but John went up a steep incline to see if he could see the parking lot from where we came.

Up the snow and ice cover cliffish incline, John found this.

To get to this, there was a lot of this ... which is much slicker and behind us was even more of a steep, icy incline, cliffish thing.

While John was taking these pictures, I was climbing up the icy incline, thinking with my gracefulness that I was surely going to fall back and really hurt myself. Remember ... ballet flats! So, I climbed up this on my hands and knees. Fun. Somewhere around that tree is where there was a place we could go over the rocks, down through an ice covered crevice that was VERY steep and where I proceeded to sit on the ice and scooch down the ice-covered rocks.

We did make it to the lot and had a good laugh after the fact. I really was scared, thinking that I was going to kill myself out there. I could see the headlines now, "Two ill-prepared 'hikers' found in Arches ... if only they had stayed on the trail ..." We couldn't find the trail!

We then went and took many more beautiful pictures throughout the park.

We're so small!

Three football fields could fit in the middle of this arch. This was quite a snowy hike to this arch, but we stayed to the well-marked trail.

Walking back to the car, we ran into this little guy. We thought it was a chipmunk type thing but it then jumped off like a kangaroo. It's rightly named a kangaroo rat.

Our final photo of the day.

This was a fun trip, and we didn't see everything there. It's definitely a park worth visiting, and we'll be sure to visit again with a pair of hiking shoes and gloves!