Short night thanks to getting the laundry done, but it needed doing. I put a pillow over my head around 3:30am when the first barrage of sniffles started from one of the girls. It seemed to help a bit, though it was a little uncomfortable. I got out of bed at 6:20am to shower. The girls were already awake. We all went down for breakfast together. Afterwards, I went to get the piano out of the car since it had been more than 10 days since their last practice. We’re trying to keep them at the level they were at before the summer so they don’t back track when they get back to regular practices. While one did that, the other repacked her bags. Jada and I did the same re-organization. Before we got ready to go, we went across the road to the City Market which seems to be yet another Krogers syndicate in the desert southwest. I’m trying out block ice in the cooler this time to see if it works any better than the cube ice. By 11am, we had packed and checked out. I stopped by a shell station to fuel up, and we were on the road. We were at the I-70 Utah visitor information center by noon. Big vistas of Mesas and valleys and canyons as we drove across the desert.
We drove past the entrance to Arches so that we could get some lunch in Moab. It’s about 8 miles south of the entrance on highway 191. They’re doing a lot of construction on that road too for improvements so it took us longer to do the 30 miles from I-70 to Moab than it would have otherwise. We had found a Baja Fresh on the Garmin, so we were heading that way. However, we didn’t find it. We found a restaurant called Baja Grill instead, but it was closed. We ended up at a place called the Slickrock Cafe around 1:15pm. Jada and Ellen split a burger since they were half pounders. I had a BBQ one for myself with Monterey Jack cheese. It was quite good, and the wait staff was friendly. Phoebe, of course, had the Kraft Mac’n’Cheese.
We drove back up the road to Arches around 2:15pm and stopped at the visitors center to pick up the Junior Ranger booklets. The girls impressed the ranger with their knowledge of the Biological Soil Crust which is the living soil responsible for holding the sand together allowing plants to grow. Stepping on it kills the living cyanobacteria, lichens, algae, and fungi which can take 250 years to re-generate depriving plants and animals places to grow and live in the harsh sands of the desert. They got a special button from the ranger about staying on the trail and protecting the crust. We watched a short film on the formation of the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. Arches lies on top of a massive salt bed thousands of feet thick in places. The salt bed was deposited 300 million years ago by what they believe was a massive sea that flowed here and evaporated. Winds and floods brought debris over the salt beds putting it under pressure causing it to sag and buckle breaking up the upper crust into mesas and sandstone fins. These were further pushed up by volcanic activity. As erosion started it’s work, the fins were thinned and in some places complete broke down resulting in the natural arches and monoliths. At least, that’s the current theory. The whole area is called the Colorado Plateau and encompasses parts of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona (including the Grand Canyon).
From the visitor center you climb up and over a ridge before dropping into the massive salt valley, and the whole park opens up to you. It’s like driving into a western movie set with the red sandstone glowing in the afternoon sun, cumulus clouds puffed just so, and the monoliths standing tall right out of the desert. You half expect someone will yell, “Cut!” and the whole things will go away. Thankfully, it doesn’t. You get to keep driving on through incredible view after incredible view - from the spaced towering monoliths to the petrified dunes to the rock pinnacles through the salt valley, past the fiery furnace, and into Devils Garden where the only campground in the park is 18 miles from the front gate. (We were in the Devil’s kitchen yesterday. The only way to sneak out is through the garden)
As we pulled into campsite 11, we could see a big black cloud in the distance. We could heard the rumble of thunder, and we could see the rain on the La Sal mountains to the south. I rushed to get the tent setup, but the ground wasn’t helping. I couldn’t get the front stakes into the ground, so Jada helped me drag the whole tent back about 2 feet so I could finally get them into the ground. Our camp site is pretty cool. It’s got a great big sandstone dune behind it as it’s main feature which is climbable. The girls were itching to give it a go, but the booming thunder sent us inside the tent. It never really did pour, but by 6pm, the sprinkles had stopped and we could see the cloud off to the north. Jada and I grilled up some chicken that we had bought that morning at the store. We ate around 6:30pm and it sprinkled while we cooked. After dinner we climbed the rocks behind us. Phoebe surprisingly was the one who could make it straight up the rock face. Then we walked down the road to the amphitheater to see the Skyline Arch just past it. There was quite a bit of rubble underneath it indicating that it had collapsed in the recent past. We didn’t get the girls into bed until a little after 9pm, and Ellen was melting down.
I worked on the journal in the dark at our picnic table. There weren’t mosquitoes, but there were instead these annoying little gnats that circle your ears and eyes. The cloud cover in the afternoon actually was welcome because before it came in, it was 97 degrees in the sun. It was probably only in the upper 80’s afterwards. As I type this at 9:30, it’s still in the low 80’s, and pleasant aside from the insects. The sunset was hidden behind the clouds, but the dusk is still visible through the clouds as I look at the giant silhouettes in front of me. None of the hikes are terribly long, but it is hot, so that’s the real adversary here. No critters that we need to be especially mindful of other than this is mountain lion country, so we’ll just have to be careful with that. There are a couple hikes that look great right here in the area of our campground which we’ll try to do early in the morning. There’s a ranger led hike in the Windows section of the park around dinner time, so we’ll have to see if we can make that.
July 28: Arches National Park, UT
I admit that I always feel conspicuous when I pull out the laptop and sit here with my notes trying to type it all in every night before it disappears. I’m just lucky the weather has cooperated for so many nights in a row...so far.
Last night was warm, and I so wish I didn’t have the rain fly on the tent. However, better safe than sorry with the storms that have been blowing through since we’ve been here. It probably only got into the low 70’s, so I don’t think any of us actually got into our sleeping bags. We had a full-ish moon last night, so when it was out from the clouds, it cast a shadow on my early morning trip down the road to the bathroom. It’s about 6 spaces down the road from our site. Not a bad walk especially that well lit. Though the bathroom lights didn’t come on when I walked in. Luckily, I always carry my head lamp anyway, just to scare the big cats. I got out of the tent around 6:20am, and Phoebe came out with me since she was already awake. Ellen and Jada followed along a little later after I had started the breakfast of eggs with yellow pepper and cheese already. No need for hot chocolate this morning since as soon as the sun crested the hills, it ramped up into the 80’s.
We had breakfast dishes cleaned up in the sink, and we were on our short drive over to the Devil’s Garden by 8am. The trailhead was only about 0.5 miles from our camp ground, but we weren’t coming back for a while, so we drove. The hike starts out between two giant sandstone fins. The only way I can describe the soft bubbly shapes of the sandstone are that they resemble Mon Calamari Cruisers from StarWars, and for you non-geeks out there, I guess imagine massive sand dunes hardened in whatever shape they were in. It wasn’t a strenuous hike, though there was an extension of the trail that would have taken us on a more strenuous section to see 4 additional arches. As it was, we saw Tunnel Arch so named because of it’s thickness through the stone. That was followed by Pine Tree Arch. I have no explanation for that one except that there is a pine tree underneath it. Maybe at some point in the past 100 years since the white man has come to these parts, a pine tree grew out of the stone. We also saw some great footprints in the soft sand around the arch including birds, lizards, and what we’re pretty sure is a kangaroo rat. The girls documented the tracks in their Junior Ranger books. Finally we saw the Landscape Arch which had big chunk fall from it in 1991 while some hikers filmed it from behind which turned out to be very fortunate position for them. The video they shot is now included in the introductory video to the park. You’re no longer allowed to hike under this arch because it is so thin now - only 6 feet in it’s thinnest section. In all, we hiked about 2 miles in about an hour and a half.
The thing that has struck me the last 2 days is how many foreign visitors are in this park. Germans, Swiss, French, Japanese, and Argentine are languages/accents I’ve heard. My guess is that this is a type of terrain that isn’t present in Europe of South America. Never having been there, that’s just a guess.
Anyway, we topped our Camelbacks off (it’s hot out here...did I mention that?) since we’re supposed to drink 1 gallon per day per person before driving to our next destination which was Delicate Arch. This is the arch most associated with the state of Utah. It’s featured on their license plate as well as their welcome signs. We had been hoping to take the 3 mile roundtrip hike up to the sandstone terrace where this arch stands so we could walk around it and photograph it up close. However, the parking lot was full, and there weren’t any pull outs anywhere near that trailhead. So, disappointed, we drove further down the road to the viewpoints that are across a canyon from the arch itself. It turned out to not be so bad. The hike up was interesting, and I could still hike out onto the Navajo Entrada stone to near the edge of the canyon following the cairns (rock piles used for navigation in rocky terrain). The girls sat on some stones while I hiked out to get a picture from a different angle. The girls drew pictures of the arch in their junior ranger handbooks and wrote about their experience sitting there looking at the arch. They both did really nice pictures. Ellen’s took in the entire fin that was home to this arch. The thing that struck me about the arch and the surrounding monoliths were the strata lines that from our vantage point were continuous from one end of the fin to the tip through all the structures on top. It shows that the stone was carved from the same earth and of the same era. It’s as if someone took a straight edge and put the lines between the different pieces of the rock to line them up just so.
When we got back down, we drove to the trailhead parking lot to troll one more time. This time, we were lucky and got a spot on the second lap. We weren’t going to hike up to the arch at this time since it was closing in on lunch. Instead we were planning to visit the Wolfe Ranch which is a historical site for the first, and apparently only white settler in the Cache valley 100 years ago. We know other cultures including the Ute Indian tribes ranged the entire Colorado Plateau including this area because not far beyond the ranch cabin on one of the sandstone walls were petro glyphs etched into the rock “varnish” on the walls. They were unable to date the etchings precisely, but they believe they pre-date the 1700’s and the introduction of horses by the Spanish explorers. There was a Ranger activity here as well given by Intern Ranger Meagan whom we met yesterday in the visitor center when the girls got their books. She was talking about the ecology of the area, and how the native plants were used. For example, something new we learned was the root of the Yucca Plat was used as a shampoo and wild rhubarb leaves are poisonous. She also had pictures of the petro glyphs and told us they were just up the trail. The pictures were still quite vivid after all this time. Meagan also told us about the program she was in, and she thought that it might be possible for the girls to get some interning done as high school students if they’re interested in working for the parks (http://www.thesca.org).
The girls had completed their Junior Ranger requirements so we went all the way back to the visitor center. Ellen finished her entire book even though she didn’t have to, and Phoebe did a bit more than required. It was beyond time for lunch, but food and drink aren’t allowed in the VC, so we ate out on one of the benches in the last bit of shade available. Jada whipped up another road side miracle (that sentence would have been great if it had involved Miracle Whip) with chicken salad pita’s. Then we went inside so the girls could receive their badges presented by Ranger Matt. It was air conditioned in the VC, so we stayed in there for a while. We picked up some post cards, a magnet, some mineral books, and Jada talked me into finally buying a wide brimmed hat. It wasn’t a hard sell since I’d been thinking about it since we arrived in the desert southwest. (I had already bought my stickers yesterday) While we sat on a bench enjoying the cool air, Meagan appeared again. This time with a quiz on animals that can be found in the park. The girls did so well again, they each received a sticker deputizing them as junior ecologists. They spent the rest of the time reading their mineral and stone books while quizzing each other. We finally decided to go, so I re-filled our camelbacks again (the only water in the park is at the VC or our campground) and got on our way. On the way back through the park we stopped at this park’s Balancing Rock for a quick walk around. Apparently, this rock also had a smaller twin called Chip off the Old Block that collapsed in 1970. The park is always changing.
While there, I watched another storm roll from the La Sal mountains as if it’s a factory pumping them out. I saw several lightning strikes. Jada may have caught one on video. We decided to head back to camp just in case. However, the storm never materialized in our area. We spent the time at the camp not doing much. The girls sat in the car at first to work on their journals because the sun was too hot, and Jada futilely lay in her cot trying to nap.
By 4pm when we headed back out into the park to the Windows district, we drove through a very brief shower, and we could see other highly localized showers over the valley. They were comically localized too. Just like those little clouds that follow cartoon characters with rain in the Sunday Comics. We joined the ranger led hike at Windows trailhead at 4:30pm. He lead us up towards North Window talking about the plants and how they survive in the desert. It was interesting even though we had learned most of it already at the Colorado National Monument. However, there was new information about how different plants favor different areas. The Black bush that is prevalent across the valleys doesn’t grow so well further up the hills where desert oak, Utah Junipers, and Pinyon Pines thrive. Yucca thrives in between these 2 zones wherever water is deep. We also learned that each type of Yucca typically only has 1 moth that will help it germinate. Finally we reached the North Window. This is a large arch facing out on the valley beyond. There’s a South Window just around the corner. From our vantage point, I couldn’t get them both in the same shot, but there are postcards that have them. Then we hiked over to the Turret Arch which as it suggests has a stone turret on one end. It was at this point we saw a whole group of people just walking across the dip between the two arch area across the Biological Soil Crust. Jada had had enough at this point of people not caring enough about how they treat our national parks, so she let them know they were busting the crust. Their response (which was completed expected) was, “we didn’t know we weren’t on the path.” Didn’t care is more like it. The paths are very clearly marked in this area. They have stairs and borders. There’s really no way to miss them unless you really try. And the Biological soil warnings are at every trail head and in the map book everyone gets when they show up, and if they ever even half listen to a ranger program. I’ll just say that it’s frustrating the way people will treat our parks. On the plus side, we saw many more who do respect the land and want to continue to preserve it.
By the time we finished at Turret Arch (another mile hike), it was 5:45pm, and we needed to get dinner. Unfortunately, that meant that we didn’t get to climb up to Double Arch or the Cave Arches. If there’s time tomorrow, maybe we’ll be able to come back and pick those up. We made brats for dinner and had blueberries with them. The girls were extremely well behaved. The clouds had moved in, and it made the temperature very pleasant for eating outside. We had hoped to do some Jiffy Pop, but we had a little bit of a melt down, and since it was already coming up on 8pm, we put the girls to bed, and Jada and I stayed up until almost 10 as I typed this, and she edited.
July 29: Arches National Park, UT
Our second full day at Arches National Park was trying to catch the hikes and arches we missed yesterday. Everyone slept in pretty well this morning. I think a lot of that has to do with the storm that blew through in the night. The winds woke me up around 1am. I lay in bed trying to fall asleep until 2am while Ellen was doing some sort of gymnastics routine in her sleep next to me (she kept kicking me) when I went out to try to figure out what was causing a sort of squeaking noise on the tent. I couldn’t fix it, so I went to the restroom , came back, and eventually fell asleep. The next time I woke up around 5am, it was lightly raining. I got up at 6:40am to start breakfast finally. Phoebe was up with me again. Ellen and Jada weren’t fully awake yet. I made eggs again to try to finish those off and make room in the cooler. We were eating by 7:20am, and done by 7:50am. It was cloudy in the morning so that kept the temperature down a bit which was nice. It was still spitting rain sporadically too.
We were ready to start our first hike of the day by 8:20am. This one was a loop right out of our campground so we only encountered one other hiker all morning. It was a nice trail featuring sand and rock scrambling. Cairns of all shapes and sizes adorned the trail for us to follow. The first arch we came to was unexpected and not on the maps called Tapestry Arch. We wound through the black bushes, yucca, juniper, pinyon, and Indian rice to a rocky outcrop overlooking the set of arches carved into the cliff side. We took a family picture there. Next we hiked for a while. Phoebe led the way watching for the cairns and keeping us apprised of changes in the trail such as climbing, descending, left, right, sand, scrambling. Ellen was right behind her practicing her Ranger talk on ecology pointing out the different plants and facts that she had learned about them so far. Broken arch is not actually broken down, but instead has a massive crack at the apex. The trail we were following went right through the arch which the girls thought was pretty cool. Most of the trails to arches we’d been to so far were just to the arch or next to it. The trail continued on to a fork where we could do an out and back trail across a meadow to a neighboring set of sandstone fins to get to Sand Dune Arch. It was a really tight squeeze to get into the passageway where the arch was, but I think it was one of my favorites. Aside from the girls talking, it was very quiet inside the fins. It was really sandy too. The girls were emptying large amounts of sand from their shoes like a character in a cartoon. I think I got a picture of them doing it. There shouldn’t have been room for their feet. We finished the nearly 3 mile hike (including walking to the trailhead from our campground) hike around 10:30am. The sun was out by now, so I applied liberal amounts of sunscreen. I didn’t want us to look like the red rocks around us like so many of the people I’d seen here already.
We ate a snack before driving on to the Windows section. I wanted to make a return trip here so we could explore Double Arch which we didn’t have time for last night. We hiked the nearly half mile round trip into the arch and back. Ellen and I made it all the way up to just below the opening out into the Cove of Caves. Phoebe joined us shortly after. I don’t know exactly how high up we were, but it was a good distance. The Double arch is the third largest in the park. It is comprised of 2 arches that share the same sandstone base, but move in two different planes. It was formed initially as a pothole arch which is an arch that forms horizontally instead of vertically. As water filled the hole beneath, it eventually carved out the area beneath the sand stone where the pothole was created. If you picture a short tunnel with a pie shaped opening in the top, that’s sort of what this arch looked like. The scale of everything here is hard to explain, and I didn’t write down the dimensions. It’s just really big. I almost forgot to mention that Jada finally ran into someone she knew. It was a parent from their school. I’m surprised it took this long.
By the time we got back to the car, it was 11:45am. We drove to the Balancing Rock picnic area, and we were able to get the table under a Utah Juniper. Jada made her yummy chicken salad pitas for us all to enjoy for lunch. Then we decided to take in one more hike (well, I decided to) called Parkway Trail near the entrance of the park. This trail runs down through the area they call the courthouse towers canyon. They call it the parkway because the sandstone cliffs rising up on either side of the wash are like skyscrapers in a big city. It was 91 degrees out, but I only had lukewarm response for one more hike. However, everyone still went with the minimum of complaining. The trail had a long staircase of stone to start out heading down to a wash where the rains rush through after a storm. The rock along the wash is really interestingly patterned with different designs that come through layers of rock as it erodes. Some of it is shale that has strata showing through. The lower layers is smooth with some ripples. Phoebe led us once again through the cairns in the canyon. We didn’t do the whole hike. We went as far as the mouth of the canyon at the other end. Since this was an out and back anyway, we retraced our steps up the long climb to the observation deck. We ended up doing a little over a mile total.
By that time, we were baked. We made a pit stop at the visitor center to top off bottles and use the restroom before driving into Moab to find some ice, and ice cream. We stopped at a City Market to pick up some bars for snacks as well as ice. We then went to Crystal’s Cupcakes & Cones for some ice cream. Since the girls had done well today, they got to choose a scoop. Ellen chose the chocolate brownie extreme. Phoebe went with the rainbow sherbet. We even dropped off some post cards and got some gas so we’re ready to take off in the morning.
We then drove by to the Visitor Center for Junior Ranger Station from 3-4:30pm. Ranger Joel led us through the creation of this area from the salt deposit to the land mound that collapsed when the rain seeped into the salt layer making it unstable which is why the fins all point in the same direction in some parts of the park, and a different way in others. He used something called moon sand to show the terrain buckling and canyon making. He also used the giant terrain map of the park in the lobby to show how each area of the park came to be. He was really an expressive speaker, to use the word Ellen thought best described him. We had him to ourselves for quite a bit before another wave of visitors came in. In that time, the girls built an arch in the sand while Ranger Joel explained the forces at work. They started with a fin and carved out the archway in it. Then they built walkways to the arch, and Phoebe smoothed it as geological time flew by. Finally, they sped up the erosion process to several million years in a few seconds as they flattened it and smoothed the sand again for the next demonstration. While I was wandering around the exhibits, I overheard a woman who had glanced at it and maybe picked up on the erosion process in a video say, “just think, if we come back in 5 years, this could all be completely different” failing completely grasp the passage of geological time.
As 4:15 rolled around, we had to head back to camp for dinner. We wanted to have an early dinner so we could get to bed earlier tonight. The goal is to be up around 5pm and out by 7am. The clouds had rolled back in at our campground, so the air was cool. However, a wind had picked up spraying sand into everything. It got into our food as we cooked (though it did add a nice crunchy, gritty quality that I believe is missing in cuisine today), and it also put a thin layer in the tent since the screens were open all day to let the tent air out. As Jada and I were walking down to wash the dishes, it started to rain. Not hard, but enough to make you a little damp. We put the girls to bed and joined them in the tent to wait out the rain. I started on the journal in there, but as soon as the rain stopped and our table dried, Jada and I went right back outside. The upside of the wind was the lack of flying insects. As we sit here this evening, we can hear someone playing guitar and a lute of some type. In every camp site around us people are talking in different languages. The wind has died down somewhat, but not completely. Ranger Joel is doing his astronomy Ranger talk tonight at the amphitheater, but I don’t think the clouds are going to cooperate. However, they do seem to be clearing ever so slightly. We’re hoping to be asleep by then though. It’s a long trip tomorrow.