Arches National Park

Visited:  June 2016

Duration: 2 days

Accommodations:  Moab Under Canvas

Arches National Park.  Park #1 of National Park Trip Season 1.  This is where it all starts.  This was my first visit to a National Park, the rest is history.  We picked a perfect park to begin at.  Arches is a drive-able park with a few trails to hit off of the main road. This is a great warm up for my kids to start their hiking careers. This year we had my mom with us who had purchased a Senior National Park pass for $10.  Good for life and lets us all in to the parks.

First stop Visitor Center.  My mom found the National Park Passport books and talked us all in to getting them. They looked fun so I bought into it.  I didn’t know how much fun they would be until later on in the trip. Good call on these Mom!! I am officially addicted to my Passport as I am typing this 2 years later.

We watched a short film on the geology of Arches National Park, grabbed a park map and headed out. As stated above Arches is a drive-able park.  One main road goes through the park, with a couple of roads to turn off and see arches.  Most Arches are within walking distance from the road.  Our first day we did the pull offs and a few of the Arches right off of the road. The second day we did some short hikes to several of the arches.

First day main road pull offs:

We turned around on the main road and headed back south.  We took the turn off for Wolf Ranch and headed to Lower Delicate Arch Viewpoint.  We walked the path to the viewpoint and then headed back to the vehicle. We were tired and really hungry.  There is no lodging or food in this park so we headed south to Moab, a few miles to get some dinner before heading back to our tent.

Day 2

The morning began with a relaxed breakfast on the porch of our tent at Moab under canvas. We enjoyed beautiful view of the Moab desert and mountains while eating our apple jacks and fruit loops 🙂

We headed to the park pretty early and the parking lots were filling up quickly.  We started our morning off by heading out to the arches we didn’t get to yesterday.  Double O arch and the windows arches.

We were done with Arches by lunchtime.  It was getting hot and we were getting hungry.  We headed back to Moab and went to Quesadilla Mobilla (recommended by TripAdvisor).  This lunch was spectacular!!!  Well worth the wait it took.  While we waited we put our stickers in our Passports and organized them, the time flew by.  We decided to head over to Canyonlands National Park to end out our day.

Arches was fantastic! We did miss a few things from not being National Park connoisseurs (yet).  3 things we will do on our return trip to Arches that we missed this time.

1. The Fiery Furnace Hike (need to plan this ahead of time).
2. Delicate Arch hike (not just the viewpoint)
3. Junior Rangers (we did grab the books we just didn’t do them) Update- thanks to Covid we pulled these books out, did them and sent them in, they mailed us our badges. See below.

Have you been to Arches? What were your favorite spots?  Anything I need to add to my return visit?