M.K.Duke

Last weekend Jason and I both happened to have three days off so we decided to make the trek down south to see Arches and two districts of Canyonlands NP.  The weather was perfect, 80 degrees, sunny and clear blue skies.  It was the first camping trip and sunburn of the season!  We camped along the Colorado River on highway 128, primitive camp sites for 8 dollars a night!!!  That is how much camping should cost, I can’t remember the last time I paid that little for a campsite.  There weren’t any showers but they had pit toilets and we were only there for two nights so we could do without showers.

I had worked the night before and had thought that I could sleep in the car on the way down but the excitement kept me awake.  We set up camp and then took a drive through Arches which was only 1 mile or so from our campsite.  We hiked part of the Devil’s Garden trail it was perfect no one was there except us…

This is what 30 hours without sleep looks like when you are in a National Park, not bad!  My feet were dragging but it was worth it!

I can imagine that this place is a zoo in the summer, luckily we had the place pretty much to ourselves on our first day but it filled up on Saturday.  The next day we drove about 40 miles to the Needles district of Canyonlands NP.  It was pretty excellent, I think not very many people must visit this park because again we had the place to ourselves despite Arches being totally flooded with cars.  We saw some petroglyphs!

Some of the glyphs date back to pre-columbian times but as you can see the “wheel” was most likely done during the time of the pioneers.  Either way it was pretty cool, I love the little goat glyphs.  We drove back through Arches on the way home and caught a glimpse of Delicate Arch, the parking lot for the hike up to the Arch was full, ugh, so we went to the other parking lot for the viewpoint…

So we are going to have to go back for a more close up picture perhaps even earlier in the season to avoid the crowds.  We also hit up the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands to see Mesa Arch.  I think this was probably the most impressive view/arch that we saw and again we were one of two cars in the parking lot which made it even more excellent…

and another view from under Mesa Arch…

We had a nice sunset here, the sun was behind us and the last rays of the day were shining on the distant rocks…

and another…

It was a perfect mini trip to get us psyched for summer.  We crossed off two more NP’s now we just need to hit up Zion and the other two districts of Canyonlands.  We also are planning on going back to Capitol Reef to do some backpacking/mountain biking, yea for living so close to cool places!