Vacation Day 4 - Arches

On Sunday, we headed to Arches National Park. This is a smaller, more famous National Park, so it was crowded.  First stop was Balanced Rock.

We then drove up to the Windows Section of Arches.  This is the view of the North Window.

On our walk to see the South Window, we got a quick picture in front of Turret Arch.  From further away, the arch looks like someone doing the OK gesture with their hand.

After walking to South Window, we decided to take the Primitive Trail back to the car.  We were the only ones on the trail and got to see an amazing view of both the North and the South Window at the same time.  Straight on, it looks like dragon looking down at us.

Caroline found a great lookout point.

On our way up to see several arches, we stopped at the Fiery Furnace.  It was kind of a creepy looking bunch of fins and needles.

We stopped off for a short hike to Sand Dune Arch.  We walked through a couple fins.  This one had a ramp!

Where the fins are super close, the air is really cool.  Kevin wanted to move to this air conditioning area.  It was well over 100 degrees today.

We made it to Sand Dune Arch.  There was a reason it was called Sand Dune Arch - we basically walked through a sand dune to get here.  By the end, our shoes were full of fine red sand.  We had to stop to empty our shoes before stopping for lunch.

After lunch, we went to the Devils Garden to see a couple arches.  Here is Pine Tree Arch - note the pine tree in the back ground.  Most of the land forms in the park were not very creative with their names!

As we were hiking up to Landscape Arch, I looked ahead to see a family taking a rest in the shade.   They looked quite familiar.  It was the Cook family.  Carys is in Caroline's class and Mia is in Kevin's.  They had bought an RV and were touring the country for the summer.  Before school got out, I had joked that we would see them at the Grand Canyon.  What do you know - We ran into them at Arches!  We walked and talked on to see Landscape Arch and then back out of the Devils Garden area.  When we were just about to the end, we hit a sand storm.  The sand stung as it hit our bare legs. Ouch!  Still, it was great to see our friends!

We didn't have much left in the tank and still had Delicate Arch left to see.  The guidebooks said that not visiting Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, is like going to the Louvre and not seeing the Mona Lisa.  We decided to take the easy way out and drove to the area that had a short (but super steep) trail to see the view of the arch.  We just didn't do the 3 mile difficult hike all the way up to the arch. 

We were good with that.  Delicate Arch - Check!

There were also some petroglyphs here in Arches, but not as impressive as the ones at Newspaper Rock.

We came home and took quick showers.  (We had to wear the next day's clothes to dinner after we were cleaned up - USWNT World Cup game was not until Monday).  Our hotel was right on the Green River.  Every time I came outside, I realized that I needed to learn more words to CCR's Green River song.  I only know one line and kept singing it over and over to myself - "Come on home to Green River."  It was annoying.