Another thing we’d heard about the area was that the line to get into Arches National Park can be backed up ½ an hour or more starting at 8am. Wanting no part of that (who wants to contribute carbon emissions while in line for natural beauty?) we prepped the girls for an early wake up and by 6:55 we’d gotten up, eaten granola bars in the car and were driving through the Arches Park gate with no other cars in sight. The beauty of the early morning light on the rock formations was totally worth it. As the sun climbed higher the light angles kept changing and we climbed up to, under and through Double Arch, around Balance Rock and to the Windows, and as the day went on the amount of visitors certainly did increase such that by the time we viewed Delicate Arch (the one on the Utah license plates), no viewpoint was without clusters of people.
We Skyped Addy’s Kindergarten classroom from the Fiery Furnace, and then went on to the Devil’s Garden Trail which took us to more arches, wonderful sandy spots for the kids to explore, and even some interesting people watching. It says something about a park when even the picnic spots are stunning. We’d love to go back and do some of the longer trails sometime, but that said, the girls put in a lot of mileage at Arches and we all went to bed tired and happy thinking of the oranges of the sandstone hills as the shadows fell into the canyon by the Colorado.
ravensroadschool 