Moab: Canyonlands & Arches NP

We are in Moab, Utah right now. Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park surround the tourist town of Moab. This is the place if you like to mountain bike and four wheel drive in the backcountry. Come in the Spring or Fall, there are less people, temps 60-75 during the day, 35-40 at night and there is still no rain. Temps during summer days are 100+, sometimes as high as 115, no thank you!

Anyway the Colorado and Green rivers meet near here. It is high (5000ft+) desert with beautiful and sometimes creepy red rock formations.

We got here about 2pm but decided to head up into Arches for a hike anyway. We went on the hike to Delicate Arch, the most photographed natural arch in the world and pretty much the signature hike for the park. Seeing Delicate at sunset is pretty cool as it really brings out the different shades of red in the rock and sky.

It’s kind of hard to describe the different rock formations in the area: natural arches made of red stone, towers that just stick up out of nowhere, long fins of rock with narrow slot canyons in between, rock bowls of various shades of red, flat mesa’s that all of a sudden end in 1000ft+ drops of sheer red cliff walls. All carved by water and erosion; especially weird when you consider it rarely rains here.

The next day, our first full day here, we did most of the hikes in Arches NP. It was kind of a Natural Arches day kind of like we had a geyser day in Yellowstone. We saw at least 12 major arches, all of which our motor home and most houses could easily fit under. The biggest, landscape arch, is over 380’ long. Picture an arch of rock only 6ft thick, a hundred feet up in the air which a football field can fit under. They say this arch could fall any day or continue it’s existence another 100 years, no one knows.

My favorite part of Arches however wasn’t an Arch. The hike from Landscape Arch to Double O Arch takes you across some very pretty terrain. One part, my favorite, is where you are actually hiking on top of a rock fin the flat part of which is maybe 4ft wide and hundreds of feet down. It traverses the end of a valley with numerous colorful fins jutting up. Kind of scary the first time you do it (we were already used to it by the time we made the return leg) and absolutely gorgeous!

Having spent two days hiking around Arches, we had seen most of what there is to see. We spent the next day in Canyonlands which is much bigger. Canyonlands is divided into three main areas by the Colorado and Green rivers which meet in the Park: Canyonlands, the Maze and the Needles. The Maze is an appropriately named area of a bunch of intersecting slot canyons between 1000ft sheer fins of rock. It is the place where that guy got his arm pinned between a bolder and the rocks walls of the canyon. He eventually had to self amputate it off above the elbow it order to get free then walk many miles to get out of the area. I read the book and it is an amazing story of what people can do when the only other choice is death.

Anyway we drove around the Canyonlands area stopping at and taking short hikes to various overview area’s. Canyonlands is all about the canyons. It is a high mesa plateau (7000ft?) where you walk to the edge at various points and check out the beautiful rock walled canyons below. Picture standing on a gigantic table. Rock walls go straight down 1000ft on all sides to another table like area. This larger table below then drops down another 1000ft+ straight down to the valleys below. You can see for hundreds of miles in all directions and the landscape just looks like a bunch of flat levels with huge gashed out valleys cut into them.

It’s almost noon, time to head out. Next stop Durango.