Parks 5 - Arches and Canyonlands National Parks

It's kind of amazing that I've spent 5 posts talking about the vacation this year.  Or maybe not amazing when you consider I could probably spend 5 posts talking about each of these National Parks.  At any rate, this post should tie up the trip.

Probably one of the most well-known arches found in Arches National Park is the one in the first picture in this post.  This is Delicate Arch, and I can tell you it's only "delicate' from a distance.  This is a big formation.  Yup, that's me standing under it. The hike up to it is not long, so we often do the hike the morning we're leaving to go to Colorado.  We still get up well before sun up, drive out to it and leave on the trail before the sun rises.  Usually that's because we're leaving after we get back down, but also there's a massive, steep section of slickrock that's a serious climb going in and better done without the sun beating down on it.   This year we weren't leaving but we had other plans for later so we did it early anyway.

This year we ran into a new problem on this hike - mosquitoes!!!  The damn little bugs were THICK out there.  So thick in fact that they essentially chased us up the trail.  It's not that they didn't allow us to stop for breaks, although they didn't.  We couldn't even slow down and did the hike much faster than usual.  And reaching the top wasn't an escape from the damn things.  Everyone up there was slapping and swinging at them.  Perhaps later in the day with the sun well up they wouldn't have been such a problem, but then I've never had a problem with them before in the  early morning.

We didn't stay long on the hike. 

The second picture is the other arch that Arches is probably most famous for, Landscape Arch.  This one is also on the hike out to Dark Angel but I had room for the picture here.  The arch itself is fenced off because the erosion under the arch itself got bad, but honetly, it's such a long arch that any closer and it's hard to take a picture of.

That afternoon we drove over to Canyonlands National Park.   I've never stayed in Canyonlands.  It's more primitive than the other National Parks in Utah - less developed.  It has some amazing vistas though and is worth going to see, but was something of a disappointment this year because the haze was so bad.  The amount of junk in the air from the Colorado and Utah fires got worse as we moved east across Utah, and it was most noticeable in Arches and especially this day in Canyonlands.   You can see that in these last tow pictures.

These pictures are from the formation that is one of the most famous from Canyonlands, Mesa Arch.  I love this Arch because of the changing perspective you get of the structures in the background distance from it.  So the first picture shows the Arch from a distance up the trail and you can see what look like large formations behind it in the distance.  The next picture is those same formations but with the picture taken through the arch when you're standing at the arch.  Amazing, huh?  They go from huge behind the arch to tiny in the distance.  I just love perspective.

So that was our vacation.  We did some more minor shopping this afternoon and then left the next morning for my sister's place in Colorado.  Overall it was a fabulous trip, and if you've never been to any of the National Parks in Utah, I recommend you remedy that lack.  You will not regret it.