Then we packed up our car and drove our short little drive to Arches National Park (about 10 minutes to the gate, but then about another 30 minutes to the Visitor Center). One of the things that we'd really wanted to see was Delicate Arch, but the rangers told us that it was actually closed (including the view point) because of flooding and some construction they were doing on the roads. So, we got some advice on other hikes. Our first stops were Sand Dune Arch and Broken Arch:
This was just a cool part of the trail you had to walk on...
Here's McGee in front of Sand Dune Arch!
And another cool part of the trail!
This is Broken Arch... if you looks closely on the indented part at the top you can see a crack that goes all the way through the arch. So, like a smart person, I went and stood under the big crack to take a picture of it!!
This is from directly under the arch, looking up. Can you see the crack going all the way through it? If you see the little notch on the left side, you can see a line that goes all the way through. It was kinda eery standing under it!
Here's just some cool scenery after we finished the hike.
Next, we went on a hike to see Landscape Arch, which is the longest natural arch in the world! It was massive. Chunks of the arch keep falling over the years, so the arch keeps getting thinner and thinner, and could fully break at any time!
It's hard to get a good picture of Landscape Arch because they have fences up so you don't get too close (due to the chunks of rock that keep falling), but if you look closely you can see the very thin arch of rock and how crazy long it is.
From there we were going to do the Primitive Loop Hike (it has like 7 cool arches) even though the rangers had told us part of it was too flooded so we couldn't do the full loop. Buuuuut pretty early on in the hike I chickened out and decided it was NOT for me because I felt like I was going to die. Now, I do NOT have a fear of heights at all... but there was a very precarious and narrow uphill arch (with drop-offs on both sides... and if you fell off you would definitely die or at least break tons of bones), and I just honestly don't feel I have the balance to attempt something like that. If there had been something I could have held onto (like a cable or chain or something) I would've felt safe... but I just had this terrible feeling I was going to fall. So, I felt really bad because I just didn't feel up for it, so we turned around and found some other arches to go see. I found a picture of the part that scared me:
Yeah, it's that narrow pathway part up the middle... I just knew I would fall.
So here's some other stuff we saw instead of doing the Primitive Loop Hike:
McGee under Pine Tree Arch!
Can you see how tiny the people look in this picture? So that tells you how big these arches are!!
And here's the view from up in those massive arches... We climbed on up.
McGee climbed up even further than I did! But then he had some trouble getting down due to a swarm of tourists... so I had to capture that on film too because it was hilarious to watch.
What is happening is this picture?? It was two parents trying to help their uncoordinated daughter climb up where McGee was... It was not going well for them, and they were oblivious to the fact that McGee wanted down!
It continues...
You can barely even see McGee in this one... They were not making it easy for him to get down!
If you look closely you can see some beautiful snow-capped mountains in the background!
Another crazy arch (Skyline Arch, if I remember right)!
After all of that hiking, we headed back to our campground. But we found out there were some more cool hikes from within our campground! So we set out to see all we could before the sun went down.
This is the view from our campground!! You can see the snow-capped mountains on the right and a nice rainbow on the left.
Snowy mountains in the background again!
This was a cool arch we hiked to from our campground! This was called Tapestry Arch, and it was maybe our favorite because we only saw one person on our entire hike!! It was so deserted and beautiful. We hiked right up to the arches and climbed up under them.
Here's a closer look before we climbed up under the arch. Once we climbed up under it we were like, "Oh crap, the sun's going down!" so we had to race back to camp since we hadn't brought a flashlight with us.
Here's our little campsite! We loved this one, and it was our first night of ACTUALLY being able to camp!! We still needed the tarp over our tent because it did start raining pretty hard in the evening, but nothing like the Grand Canyon (there was no flooding). Oh and those are our cute $6 chairs from Walmart!
Look at the cool rock on the side of our campsite! It provided great privacy from our neighbors.
We cooked up some ground turkey and made delicious burritos over our campfire, and toasted some marshmallows for dessert!! It was awesome :) The rain started at about 8pm, so we went to our tent about that time because it wasn't expected to stop until after midnight. The tarp held up really well though and we didn't get wet at all!
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