{"id":387,"date":"2010-04-18T21:06:52","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T05:06:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/?p=387"},"modified":"2010-04-18T21:08:30","modified_gmt":"2010-04-19T05:08:30","slug":"arches-national-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/?p=387","title":{"rendered":"Arches National Park"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Last week was my Spring Break.\u00a0 WHEE!!\u00a0 Spring Break is such a magical time.\u00a0 This year, Tom and I decided to head wherever was cheapest, and fun…est.\u00a0 We also wanted to try to include some National Parks, as we are still on our quest to visit all of the NPs in the country.\u00a0 We ended up deciding on Utah, and specifically visiting Arches, Canyonlands and Capitol Reef National Parks.\u00a0 We started off in Arches, which is just outside Moab, Utah.\u00a0 We arrived late on Sunday night and camped at a DNR campground just outside the park, next to the Colorado River.\u00a0 The forecast called for a cold, windy night, but it was windy beyond belief.\u00a0 Like, I thought the tent might collapse kind of windy.\u00a0 Sweet.<\/p>\n

So after not too much sleep, we headed into the park the next morning. Many areas of middle to southern Utah are made up of these gorgeous red-rock mesas, gorges, and arches, and this park is no different.\u00a0 Soaring walls of stark reddish orange towered over us as we snaked through the park to arrive at Balanced Rock. Basically, the “rock” is there because it is made up of a more durable (less susceptible to erosion) type of rock, while the rock underneath is much softer, making it erode more quickly, giving it the “balancing” look.\u00a0 Eventually the base will wear away completely, and the “Balanced Rock” will collapse to the ground.\u00a0 The light was a bit tricky early in the day, so our photos here aren’t super fabulous, but the feature was really interesting.<\/p>\n

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Next we traveled deeper into the park to an area called Devil’s Garden.\u00a0 By this point, it was afternoon, and we still hadn’t seen any of the park’s namesakes!\u00a0 I wanted to see some arches!\u00a0 We found them here though. The first one we visited was Landscape Arch, a delicate, impressive span that looks almost impossibly long.\u00a0 We were unable to venture under it, as I believe the park service is worried about parts breaking off and landing on tourists!<\/p>\n

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After that we ventured up the “primitive trail” to Partition Arch, which is visible in some of our photos of Landscape Arch.\u00a0 Up here the wind started kicking up, as in gusting probably 30ish mph.\u00a0 With sand.\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 Partition Arch was amazing, as it overlooked the entire valley; we could see for probably a hundred miles. Amazing.<\/p>\n

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Leaving this area of Devil’s Garden, the wind started blowing in earnest.\u00a0 We kept having to stop and turn our backs to the gusts and hide our eyes.\u00a0 The sand stung our skin and was burning our faces.\u00a0 This was when I realized I am not really cut out for desert travel.\u00a0 Clearly something I needed to learn the hard way.\u00a0 We did stop by Pine Tree Arch and Tunnel Arch on the way out, but spent very little time there due to sandblasting.<\/p>\n

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We decided to risk one other area of the park to visit Double Arch, which, as the name implies, is where to arches were formed from the same part of rock, but span in two different directions.\u00a0 Yay erosion!\u00a0 I have a feeling the wind had something to do with this as well.\u00a0 After taking about a gazillion more photos, we retreated back to the car.\u00a0 It took very little work to “convince”\u00a0 Tom that we needed to spend the night in a hotel that night rather than camping in the 40+ mph winds again.\u00a0 And there was a shower. Whee!\u00a0 The Super 8 cost 55.00 with our AAA membership, which meant we got a room and a tub.\u00a0 No closet or, strangely, trash can, but hey, I wasn’t complaining.\u00a0 There was no wind.<\/p>\n

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The next morning, before we headed over to Canyonlands, we went back into the park to check out Delicate Arch.\u00a0 This is THE arch.\u00a0 Like, the one Utah deemed worthy of putting on it’s license plate.\u00a0 In the morning light with some spectacular clouds, the scene was striking indeed.\u00a0 It was quite cold, and guess what, windy!\u00a0 The arch was exquisite though, and quite fun to photograph.\u00a0\u00a0 Arches was a wonderful way to start out our trip to this very unique part of the country.<\/p>\n

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Last week was my Spring Break.\u00a0 WHEE!!\u00a0 Spring Break is such a magical time.\u00a0 This year, Tom and I decided to head wherever was cheapest,…<\/p>\n

Continue readingArches National Park<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12,13],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hiking","category-travel","category-whimsy","tag-travel","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=387"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":433,"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387\/revisions\/433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amyalphin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}