Another Summer, Another Epic road trip in the books.
After a great vacation last year, we decided we could do another 10 day, drive across the country cramming in a as much as we could. Spend all day doing stuff, then load into the truck and drive another 4-6 hours... why not!!! I think I spent the entire vacation on almost no sleep and all coffee. I was dehydrated the whole trip since bathrooms were sparse while driving and hiking. Almost now water just coffee!!
- Pre Drive Friday Night to Altoona IA
- Day 1 Drive to Denver Co - Red Rocks Amphitheatre
- Day 3 Part 1 Drive to MOAB, Hike Corona Arch!!
- Day 3 Continued - Jet Boat Tour and Sunset at Dead Horse State Park
- Day 4 - Sunrise at Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, Part 1
Sunrise At Delicate Arch Overlook
I was here many years ago with just my wife, and we tried to do sunrise at delicate arch. That's a time we had no idea how long it would take to get into the park, the road was under construction and you could only get into the park what construction overnight was ended. Because of that we overestimated length of line to enter the park, and we missed the sunrise. While we still got the seat delegate Arch it was absolutely packed. In fact when we went to arches National Park back then we didn't get to see very much because there was absolutely no parking, they were people who decided to try to pull full size RVs and campers up into the park and into the parking lots where it was just pure chaos with no real parking available. You just circled the lots looking.
Since we knew he wanted to try to do the sunrise, this time we knew we had to get up early. Well we did pay for the timed entry at 6:00 a.m. there was no real need. If you remember from the prior post we did sunset at dead horse which was an hour away from our hotel, and we had to drive and hike for the sunrise and delicate arch. That means we got somewhere between four and five hours of sleep before we had to get up at 4:00 a.m. to load up and get going.
By this point you probably all think I'm nuts, but I do love seeing sunrises and as I get older I sleep worse and worse in hotels so I'm already going to get up. My kids on the other hand were not excited to wake up after 5 hours of sleep gear up and start hiking right away.
It was really cool because as soon as we got to the parking lot there was about four or five other cars getting ready to do the same thing, we all had our headlamps and we're getting our backpacks being really quiet with the pure home and quiet the park. I saw a shooting star for the first time and I don't know how long, stargazing is absolutely amazing since there is no light. It really makes you understand why our ancestors would stare up at the stars so much, and how much of that is missed now that I live in a city with light pollution everywhere.
It was really beautiful watching the sun come up over the entire landscape, we actually started from behind the arch looking off in the other direction to take these photos. Landscape there is just crazy and it makes you think of a giant flood coming through with carving out those deep round pockets.
Delicate Arch
Delicate Arch is one of the most popular artists to go see the hike out wasn't too bad although it was a little interesting in the dark. These are some of the best photos I managed to take, I don't think I noticed how different The Rock colors were the last time I was here, and it really seemed to stand out this time.
The last time I was here there was probably 10 times you want to people that there were this year, although we went at the very end of August when a lot of schools had already started for the last week or two. We're sort of fortunate that our state started early so that we were able to get a vacation when they said that the number of visitors in the national parks was much lower than just a few weeks before, and almost everyone we saw it felt like was a foreign visitor hiking a trails. It was kind of cool
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Erosion
Found this on a rock up above and behind the arch where we took some of our pictures from. It just shows you how the crazy erosion happens in the middle of a giant rock where some of it sticks around and other but just starts. Honestly this opening was really small my phone is right up next to it but it's still really cool.
Sand Dune and Broken Arch Trail
What's next is a couple of our favorites the Sand dune and broken Arch trail. These two are just so different than the other ones that they're definitely worth a visit. The Sand dune Arch is in between a couple of deep canyon walls that is filled with very deep soft sand. There were some wedding photos being taken but they were nice enough to not take too long and allow us to get in and see it for a few minutes all to ourselves before tour bus stop by.
Balanced Rock
Balanced Rock is one that I think I skipped the last time I was here, we just had no way of getting out and finding a place to park the parking lot here is actually very small. The most interesting thing about balanced Rock is how all of these photos are of the same Rock but depending on your perspective the way it looked changes a ton. Sometimes when you look at it you may think it looks like a certain feature, and then as you walk around it it looks kind of like a mini sphinx
Windows Trails
Windows trail is right off of balanced Rock trail and I really liked it. We did the entire loop of the hiking trails you can see below. We are able to get a couple of really nice photos of the windows from both sides and as you scroll down you'll see that what the windows look like from each side. The trail was long and very lightly used, in fact we had a hard time following it at a few points because you couldn't quite tell where it went. We actually ran into a park ranger who was happy to share his knowledge about some of the stuff that you might otherwise overlook.
Double Arch
Double Arch was absolutely mind blowing it's just crazy to see all these arches stacked up. Not only are there two arches really close to each other, they are massive arches the scale of them was just hard to fathom. I will say it was a little unsettling climbing underneath them amongst the big boulders which have clearly fallen at some point when wondering if it was going to fall that day.
Driving to Mesa Arch
Think we spent a good 6 or 7 hours in arches National park, knowing that we probably won't be able to come back very much. After that we decided to grab a little lunch and then drive off to Mesa Arch which is my wife's favorite. It was only a 40 mile drive took about an hour but we got to see some good overviews and looks along our way.
Mesa Arch
Shockingly I have no photos of Mesa arch. I looked all through my phone and I don't have any, I will say that it was very busy place at the time we went there for some reason. There were a couple of families with lots of kids traveling who were also not in school and I know our time was very limited it makes Arch to take photos. I think maybe they all ended up on my wife's phone and account and I just can't find them.
Green River Overlook
Sometimes I really like the geography in the southwest because you can just see who it feels like forever and you get this fast landscape and you can see the mass of geological features and just the power that water and rain and floods can have the landscape. It just kind of think of how much water had to be flowing to carve through their land and The Rock like this over the years.
It's such a tiny little river down there, but you know that during the floods and the rainy season that it must have been absolute monster.
Grand View Point
There's a lot of viewpoints like this when you're in Utah and I think most of them are worth stopping and getting out of your car for 5 to 10 minutes it's just kind of look at it. Most of them are very similar, they all get their own unique perspective. Sometimes you can see the Snow camp mountains, sometimes you see stuff that looks like hoodoos, another times it's nice to still look out all the entire landscape and realize how small you are, how hard it must have been to ride a horse through all of that, and how hard it must be to live out here with such little water and dirt. Almost nothing grows it would be a very hard hard life.
Whale Rock - Sun Set
Since we had our headlamp so long from the morning we decided to go out the whale Rock it's sunset. So hike we done before and we liked it fortunate for us we're the only ones on this trail the parking lot was empty we had to rock to ourselves. We sat up there and I set up my phone to take a time lapse of the sunset. The only problem is I can't get the 35 second video to load anywhere to post it so I just took a couple of screen grabs out of the sunset to show you how good it looked.
I absolutely love the red and the orange in the sunsets, and you can see in the clouds that it is raining just in that one little spot. It's pretty cool to see the rain's about just dropping off a load of water right beneath it.
Vacation Stats
Pre Drive Friday Night
Day 1 -Drive to Altoona
- 271 Miles
- 4 Hrs
Day 2 - Drive to Red Rocks & Hike - Drive to Look out Mountain and Eldorado Springs
- 694 Miles Red Rocks
- 10 Hours to Red Rocks
- 65 Miles Round Trip
- 2 Hours Round Trip
Day 3 Drive to MOAB - Hike, Jet Boat Tour and Dead Horse State Park
- 342 Miles
- 5.5 Hours
- Corona Arch, Pinto and Bow Tie Arch
- Jet Boat Tour
- Dead Horse State Park
Arches National Park
- Sunrise at Delicate Arch
- Sand Dune and Broken Arch Trail, Balanced Rock, Windows Trials, Double Arch
- Mesa Arch
- Sunset at Whale Rock
- Driving 80 Miles, 1H 50M
Vacation Running Stats
Total Miles - 1452
Total Time Driving - 23.25
Summary
Well that was quite a day for. Sunrise to sunset after a full day the day before with only 4 or 5 hours of sleep. On our way back to the hotel my youngest son asked if we could go back to arches National Park in the morning for stargazing. That meant that we would have to get up even earlier than the night before to get a good hour or more parked out in the open under the sky. He didn't want to hike to an overlook or an arch, he just wanted to park in the parking lot at the very top and look up at the skies and the stars. So as we went to sleep on our fourth night of our trip driving somewhere close to 15 to 1600 miles after all the little side trips and day to day stops and activities spending probably over 24 hours in a truck he was standing up