All photos and text are property of Dave Forney and may not be used without express permission.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Arches National Park 1

Arches National Park is like a giant outdoor playground.  The arch below is the most photographed natural arch in the world, and it appears on Utah's license plates and many other iconic images of the west.


Everything is so big and vast in this part of the country.  The sky and rocks and everything just seem to be on a super-sized scale.  In the distance you can see Balancing Rock, another famous sight in Arches.  It doesn't look very big from this far away.  Incidentally, this is where we ate our picnic lunch...the picnic table being just behind me when I took the picture.  Pretty awesome hugh?


But up close it's massive, and awe-inspiring.  You can go up and walk around it, but there's no people in this picture.  If there were, they would look like ants next to balancing rock, which is 128 feet tall!


There were actually a ton of people at Arches when we were there--lots of buses full of friendly Asian tourists, and a ton of snow birds heading south for the winter.  So most of the sights next to the main road were really crowded.  Since we're not really crowd-type-people, especially when trying to enjoy the wilderness, we set off and did some longer hikes.  It didn't take long to loose the crowds and pretty soon it was just us, and the vast land and sky of the American Southwest.  Amazing!


Like I said, it's a giant playground, and we had a lot of fun exploring it.



Here's Britton and Hudson being dwarfed by a giant arch.  Cool hugh?


The twins wanted their own version.


The third day we were there, we took a 10 mile unpaved road to a remote part of the park.  We were the only vehicle there.  Then, with plenty of water and a packed lunch, we set off hiking to find the arch below.  It was a ton of fun


Here's all seven of us.  Can you tell who's who?

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