Hiking Arches National Park - Moab, UT

We started super early this morning, drove into Arches National Park just in time for the sunrise, unfortunately it was overcast so the colors were not great. First activity of the day was hiking Devil's Garden. It is very highly rated as one of the best hikes in the park. There is some rock scrambling involved as well as some narrow 'trail' paths across some very high rocky portions of the mountain path. The hike started easy enough with some outlook hikes to view various arches. Landscape Arch was really beautiful. Then we came to the more strenuous part of the hike. It started out easy enough over some rocky steps, and then we came to a portion of the hike where we and another hiker thought we had gotten off trail because we were looking up at a steep hill of rock with some boulders about halfway up. It was a fairly narrow passage and after checking out maps, decided that this was the path for the trail. We made it up and past the boulders in the middle of the path and up the steep boulder scramble incline. Past that difficult part were some great arches ( Partition Arch was amazing). The path continued to get more strenuous and difficult. At this time of the morning the winds were picking up. We came to a section where we basically had to climb up to a narrow ridge that went between two canyons. The rock path was pretty narrow. Scott tried his best but his fear of heights got the best of him and we decided to not continue and turn back. We only missed one arch. It was the right decision, better to be safe and not have a really serious incident. On the way back we visited the rest of the arches and overlooks in this area of the park. It's a good thing that we had our hiking poles and good hiking boots because this was not an easy hike and difficult on the body.
After lunch we drive around the park road and visited more lookouts and arches. Each lookout has a parking area and you then hike to the overlook area to get a better view, or up to arch itself. This took a while since there are quite a few arches in the park.Read more