WOW! Our Heads are Spinning from all the Beauty Around Us.

 

Park Avenue, Arches National Park, Utah

Here it is early May and we are at our last layover campground before arriving at our summer destination.  But it is not a brief layover, no, we're here for a solid two weeks.  There is so much to do in this part of Utah that I am not sure two weeks is going to be enough to do it all.  But we're going to give it a go.

Everything within a day's drive is on our radar.  With that as a guide we are going to get to Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Colorado River Scenic Drive, and shopping trips to Moab and Green River, Utah and Grand Junction, Colorado.  We burned up a lot of  electrons taking pictures.  Hundreds and hundreds of photographs.  I don't have the patience and I don't think you have the tolerance to read my narration of these two weeks so I will instead make this a photo essay with a pithy comment here and there.  First post: Arches NP.

The bigger the screen you can use the better it is.

Arches National Park

May 4, 2023

On the road straight up from the Arches NP entrance (below) to the 
top of the plateau where all the "good stuff" is.  Moab is in the distance.

One of the first prominences seen is named "Park Avenue".
But a standard photo doesn't cut it, see the panorama below. 

Once you get on the plateau and up to Park Avenue it is nearly impossible to look in any direction and not say; "wow!".

Courthouse Towers

The Three Gossips

Sheep Rock

Balanced Rock
The rock on top is 55 feet tall and weighs 3,500 tons.

Turret Arch, center foreground.
As seen from Balanced Rock Trail.

Turret Arch, extreme right and Double Arch, center-left.

Turret Arch again.
Sorry, couldn't help myself.

Double Arch.
Really, there are two arches in there.

Double Arch
Hard to see in two dimensions but it is there.

North Window Arch

North Window Arch

North Window Arch

Next we hiked up to an overlook to Delicate Arch.  It is springtime in northern Utah and we found the high desert to be in bloom.

We hiked up to the Delicate Arch Overlook.
It wasn't a short walk but it was a well-groomed trail.

This is how far we had come.

And this is how far we had yet to go.

The hike to the overlook paid off with this view.
And no, I wasn't holding the camera crooked.
The surface of the earth had been deformed this far out of plumb.

Delicate Arch
It may be delicate but it is not small.  Those aren't ants on
the ridge to the left.  Those are people.

The arch wasn't the only view from the overlook.

Skyline Arch

The view looking out from Skyline Arch.

From here we were on the return leg of the drive.  The skies had cleared and we were seeing things from the opposite direction with very different lighting.  It was almost like a completely different park.  There are many more pics of already captured formations but in varying degrees of broken-cloud light.  I may post them at a later date.

Net post:  Canyonlands.