Day 9: Arches National Park

It was another early start today, with the alarm set for 6am. The plan for today was to visit Arches National Park, the entrance to which is located just a few miles outside of Moab. This is another national park which gets extremely busy, with the result that it's only possible to enter between the hours of 7am and 4pm with a timed entry permit. I'd had to be online at the right time to secure one of these for today back in April! I'd chosen the 7–8am slot in the hope that we could see some of the park before the worst of the crowds hit.

We made it to the park entrance in plenty of time and were pleased to see that there wasn't much of a queue to enter. As we began driving along the main road through the park, the sun was just beginning to rise.

As you can probably guess from the name, Arches National Park is famous for its concentration of natural stone arches; more than anywhere else in the world. We hadn't driven as far as any of the arches yet, but the scenery was still impressive.

The rocks here are sandstone and they're a beautiful shade of red.

Arches is the sort of national park where parking spaces can fill up very quickly, so we needed to be strategic about where we wanted to visit while it was still relatively quiet.

There were two arches I definitely wanted to see: Delicate Arch and Landscape Arch. Delicate Arch is the most popular of the two, so we decided to drive in that direction first.

As we did, we passed all sorts of impressive rock formations and had to resist the temptation to stop and take a photo of absolutely everything

From the roadside we got our first glimpse of two arches in the distance; it was an incredible view with the sunrise behind them.

The sun was getting higher in the sky when we made it to the car park from which we could walk to a viewpoint of Delicate Arch.

Probably the most popular thing to do in the park is to hike all the way up to Delicate Arch and queue to take a picture under it. I'd ruled out doing that, because the trail sounded quite challenging. So we were walking towards a place from where we'd be able to see the arch about a mile away.

Before too long we turned a corner and caught sight of the arch on the hill in front of us.

We continued following the trail, which took us slightly uphill for a closer view.

Delicate Arch is the largest free-standing arch in the park.

It's become a symbol of Utah, featuring on the car licence plates for the state.

If you look closely at the picture below, you should just be able to make out a line of people queuing to take pictures with the arch.

It was only 07.30 in the morning and already looking pretty busy up there! It was fun to see the arch from a distance but if I'd climbed over really difficult rock to get to it, I think I'd be a bit annoyed to find so many other people up there!

I'm sure it's impressive close-up, but seeing it from this distance felt like a good compromise

We headed back down to the car park and began driving to the starting point for the hike to the second arch I wanted to see: Landscape Arch.

We got a parking space without any problems and started walking through an area of the park which is known as Devil's Garden.

I don't know why it's got that name, but it was a very impressive landscape.

There was a really bright blue sky this morning, which contrasted against the colours of the rocks.

The aim of the hike was to see Landscape Arch, but a slight detour offered us the opportunity to see two additional arches. The first of these was called Tunnel Arch.

As we got closer to it we could see how it got the name; it really does look like a tunnel!

We decided to take a selfie with it

From there we had a short walk to our next arch.

This was Pine Tree Arch.

You can see with us for scale that it's a pretty big one!

And the view through it was gorgeous

After Pine Tree Arch we had to retrace our steps back up to the main trail towards Landscape Arch.

It was getting close to 9am by this point and the trail was starting to get busier, although not unbearably so.

And the views were still fantastic.

It was turning into a really hot sunny day and I was glad I'd put sun cream on, despite the fact it's a struggle to find the motivation to do that when you're going out in the dark!

Outside of the rocks, everywhere was quite sandy and it really did feel like hiking in a desert. On a few bits of the trail there was so much sand that it felt like walking on the beach.

Eventually we turned a corner and got our first view of Landscape Arch.

It's hard to make out against the background in the photos because of the rock behind it, but this arch is huge.

The length of the arch is 306 ft, which makes it the longest natural arch in North America.

At it's narrowest point, the arch is only 11 ft wide.

A large slab of rock fell off the arch in 1991 and since then it hasn't been possible to walk under it. Theoretically the arch could collapse at any point.

I'm glad to have seen it before that happens

The trail continues on to more arches after this point but it becomes a scramble over rock that I didn't fancy. We turned around to go back to the car.