Moab

Travel Day - Moab, UT

On Saturday, I made the hour and 45 minute, 100 mile drive to Moab, Utah, after spending almost a month in Colorado! The campground was adequate, but a long way from nice. It is under new ownership since I booked it, and they seemed to have recently renovated the common areas, like bathrooms, office, and pool area, which I guess is nice, but not really important to me. The campsites themselves were tiny though, which I guess isn’t as easily fixed: I did get a rain shower right at sunset that brought a double rainbow, so it wasn’t all bad:

Arches National Park

Arches is another national park that is requiring reservations in addition to the normal park pass to get in this year, so I was disappointed when it took over 30 minutes to get into the park during my designated hour on Sunday, but I guess I was lucky they were doing reservations or the line could have been really bad. It ended up not being a big deal, since I couldn’t get in until 11 AM anyways, I just used the day to gather info at the visitor center and plan what I wanted to do when I could get in earlier. I’ve found that hiking when it is 90+ degrees and little to no shade is not very fun, so it is best to hit the trails early and be trying to wrap up by 10 or 11.

Monday morning I had an entry reservation for 7 AM, and there was no wait, so I was able to get to the trailhead I wanted by 7:30, which was perfect. Arches National Park definitely lived up to its name, here were some of the arches that I saw:

Landscape Arch

Double O Arch

Partition Arch

There were lots of canyons and rock formations too:

Arches National Park is a certified International Dark Sky Park, which basically means you can see a lot of stars at night. Tuesday night was a clear and moonless night, so I went back in to Arches and tried taking some pictures. I still have a lot to learn about photography, especially at night, but I did get one picture that even though it is a little out of focus still looks pretty cool of the Milky Way over Moab: I didn’t get a decent video or picture of it, but I also saw one of these Starlink satellite trains which was pretty interesting:

Canyonlands National Park

On Monday afternoon, after hiking in Arches, I went to the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands National Park, primarily to hit the visitor center for more info, but I also ended up driving the roads in that district. I’ve really been trying not to say this too often, but pictures really can’t do justice to how vast and beautiful this was.

Tuesday was mostly a planning/relaxing/laundry day until I went to Arches for the night sky. Wednesday morning I drove down to the Needles district of Canyonlands to do the Slickrock Trail and check out the rest of that district. The Slickrock Trail was well marked with cairns, or these small piles of rock: These were nice because it is quite easy to get off the trail when hiking on rock because there is not always an obvious trail, like there is usually in the woods. The hike was less than 3 miles but took me through an elevated plateau that offered 360 degree views of the park, including a good view of this canyon:

I did another short trail that let me see the rock formations for which the Needles district is named:

Capitol Reef National Park

On Thursday morning I went to Capitol Reef National Park, and it has taken the distinction of my least favorite park on this trip so far. It was a long ways away from everything else I had planned on doing, offered little hiking, and even the scenic drive was relatively short. Part of the problem is one of the main roads to enter the park was washed out in a rainstorm, so you have to drive pretty far out of the way to get in currently. It was pretty though:

Goblin Valley State Park

The good thing about going to Capitol Reef was that I drove by Goblin Valley State Park to get there, and was intrigued by the name, so decided to stop by on the way back to Moab. It was a cool park that had a valley full of these rock sculptures:

The whole valley was a free-roaming area, which I found cool, weird, and frustrating all at the same time. At first it sounded really cool to be able to go anywhere you wanted, but I quickly found that to be a little weird after several months of being told to stay on trails to protect the environment. It was also a little frustrating at times because I would walk for a ways and get trapped by a dried out creek bed that was too large to easily jump or climb across, so I would have to walk back and try to find a different route. Eventually I made my way to a hill approximately in the middle of the valley and found a nice view:

Friday ended up being another pretty lazy day.