Utah: Fiery Furnace Hike @ Arches NP

Visiting Arches National Park was one of the big reasons we chose to come to Moab. In a lot of ways, Arches seems to be a very vehicle-oriented park. You drive a bit, hop out and walk a bit, see some cool stuff and do it all over again as you make your way through the park.

But there's one feature at Arches that had me hooked from the first time I read about it: The Fiery Furnace. It's a maze of spires and slots and canyons that you have to get a permit to do or join a Ranger-led hike. I missed the window to get tickets to the Ranger-led hike, but put on my calendar and Nate's the day & time that permits for self-guided hikes for the Fiery Furnace became available. Reading other folks' comments about the permit process made the chances of securing a permit sound very daunting. Through the process of organizing this trip, I've become keenly aware of the fierce competition to get permits & campsites at national and state parks, so I didn't hold out a whole lot of hope that we'd snag a permit.

Fortunately, after some frantic searching and adding to cart at the moment the permits became available, we secured a permit last week to hike the Fiery Furnace today. I was ELATED!

So this morning, after 3 very busy days, we again pulled ourselves out of bed long before we were actually ready to get out of bed, grabbed breakfast as we walked out the door and loaded into the car to make our way out to the Fiery Furnace. We had hoped to beat the crowds and heat, and I'm happy to say the effort was worth it. As we drove in, there was only one other car in the parking lot.

We started out the hike into the Furnace by climbing down down a steep, narrow crevice between a series of rocks, and that's pretty much how things went the rest of the hike. Loads of scrambling across boulders, shimmying through narrow slots, climbing up various ancient rocks, shaking lots of sand out of shoes and searching (sometimes in vain) for teeny tiny NPS trail markers. We spent about 3 hours on the "trail" that's theoretically about 2 miles, but my step counter says we did more like 3.5 miles.

We saw a plethora of beautifully carved passageways and found a few smaller arches and made it to Surprise Arch and Skull Arch. It was fun and challenging for us all. And I think Nate, especially, could have spent all day exploring it all again and again.

We'll be back again later in the week to explore Arches NP more fully. But for now we're happy and delighted with our first taste of what it has to offer.Baca selengkapnya