Day 12: Arches National Park and Carolyn's birthday!

Good morning and happy 24th birthday to our big sister Carolyn! Eric surprised her with breakfast of eggs, over-medium, hashbrowns and toast from the great little restaurant that hosted our campgrounds. I made some fresh coffee for her--which is a must under our standards :-)

We relaxed this morning and used the "complimentary showers" before we got back on the road for a 2 hour drive to the majestic red arches!

The drive seemed quick and we really enjoyed the moon-like landscape on our way northeast. We arrived at the arches around 1 and checked the visitor center out for which trails to tackle for the day and for tomorrow. We decided to hike the Delicate Arch today (3 miles) and then do the full Devil's Garden hike (7 miles) tomorrow.

On the drive to trail enterance of the Delicate Arch, we stopped to hike and take pictures at the Courthouse Towers at Park Avenue viewpoint, Balancing Rock and the Petrified Dunes.

Getting to Delicate Arch was semi-challenging, yes, the steady incline up rock face for nearly 1,000 ft involved a bit of huffing and puffing but then the damn trail drops off and nobody knew where to go. Thank goodness there was a group ahead of us that sorta figured out the trail, otherwise they trail continues on sandstone, which is hard to make out footprints in. Anyways, we finally made it to the Delicate Arch. I can hardly believe this was naturally created (over millions of years, mind you). It's simply stunning.

We rested, took in the spectacular views, had a couple granola bars and headed back. We drove into Moab and stopped at a little cafe for a bite to eat and to take advantage of their wi-fi. After uploading pictures and updating the blog we figured we'd better look for a place to pitch a tent. The barista suggested we check out all the BLM sites along the Colorado river there. There are 28 different campgrounds up a nearly 30 mi. stretch of hwy. And every single one of them was booked. And I mean PACKED... on a Wednesday!? Frustrated and getting a little worried, we turned around back towards town to look for more RV park/ campgrounds. No luck. Everything was booked solid there too. It's getting dark now and we still didn't know where to go. We resort to thinking about a hotel room, but at $70/night minimum, we're considering sleeping in the car. Finally we find a local hostel - The Lazy Lizard. The guy offers us a very modest cabin with one small bed for $30 or... we can pitch our tent in the backyard for $7. We chose the latter. Yet we soon find out it's $7 PER PERSON and we're setting up camp in a janky gravel yard of maybe 40' x 15' among 6 or 7 OTHER tents. Ugh! At this point, we were so exhausted and irritated we just tossed him the money and said goodnight.

The next morning we tried to set foot on a lighter note and so we decided the nearest pancake house sounded like the right step. After totally stuffing ourselves, we put on our hiking boots and filled our water bottles for Devil's Garden. Landscape Arch is so freaking fantastic. You can see it there in the picture cutting across the upper left side. Originally the arch that was formed here was much thicker, but in 1991 a group of hikers in the area heard a loud crack, then a thundering, as rock from the lower part of the formation fell creating a very thin and delicate reaching arch.



We continued along the trail exploring more arches and crazy cool rock formations. The views are just spectacular from up there. How fantastic this country is... Truly.