Arches National Park

On the drive the next day from Bryce, I felt like we were in the middle of another beautiful national park the whole day. This had to be one of the most beautiful drives I've ever taken. If you ever get a chance to drive along highway 12 in Utah - definitely do it - you'll be amazed! The rock formations and colors were awesome. We even stopped at one site that had petroglyphs right off the road - very cool!



















We got to Moab in the afternoon and after dinner, went to see Arches at sunset, which was quite beautiful. Scott made fun of me as a sunset mad-woman because I was driving like crazy to try to get all of the best spots for sunset viewings - we did, though!


















The next day, we spent a few hours in the park at Arches. I had kind of expected the park to have Arches everywhere you looked and it wasn't like that at all. It was cool and the arches were amazing, but the park was much more spread out than Bryce and had a lot of area that was more flat, with arches and other rocks interspersed throughout. Still amazing, but not as great as Bryce in my opinion. We first drove and did a short hike into see the Landscape Arch, which is probably the world's longest arch. It's even longer than a football field! A piece of it fell off a few years back and you can no longer hike under it, but just seeing it from a distance was wonderful. We then went to see the Delicate Arch, which is probably the most famous one. This is the one that is on the Utah license plate! We didn't hike all the way to walk under it, but could see it from a viewpoint (still sore from backpacking!) The last stop we made was to Windows and this was really cool because there were arches everywhere! This is more what I expected of the park. We could even sit under one of the big arches in the shade and just hang out for a while. It was cool to see spot where other arches were starting to be formed. Over time, the current arches will likely be destroyed by the same thing that creates them - water and nature breaking down the weaker rock. But there will likely be others that are formed over time, so this park is likely to look completely different in a few thousand years!