We drove down on Thursday, Victor and Lina had Fall break from school so that first evening we watched the sunset from inside Arches National Park at the Windows Section. It turns out that so did a lot of other people, the entire town was booked up with families on Fall break. The restaurants were all over flowing with lines out the door; so we figured it best to go to the grocery store and get dinner there. The hotel had a microwave and frig, so that was better than facing the crowds.
That figure would be Lina standing on top of Double "O" arch. We decided to do a hike in the Devil's Garden area of the park, the section at the end of the road. We found one of the last parking spots at ten in the morning, it was filling up fast with over weight tourists. Now I say this because most are there to just walk the mile and a half to the first arch, which happens to be the largest, Landscape Arch. The sad thing is about half of them don't even make it that far and after that arch 90 percent drop off from the hike totally.
Our initial goal was "Dark Angel" at the very end of the trail; that would be the dark spire off to the left of Lina. Well we made it there and decided to go exploring farther past the point of the trails.
After several miles of wandering we came upon countless more fins and narrow slot canyons between them. One of them we were able to climb to the top and take this shot looking back at Dark Angel
Looking ahead the fins of Arches kept going on for miles. It would really be fun one day to get far in there and explore. Here we were totally alone and heard just the sounds of the birds.
On Saturday we got a permit to hike in the "Fiery Furnace" section of the park. This area is very tight and involves some climbing skills. Starting at the bottom, we worked our way up through some tight slot canyons. Many time finding dead ends to our route, forcing us to retreat to another parallel canyon.
Once you got up some of these so called chimney's the views were spectacular. After five hours we finally made it to the top via a rather exposed climb up a steep angled sandstone ledge.
I can't wait to get back there again.
Richard Boyer
Arches is such a great place.
ReplyDeleteI spent Christmas eve and day in Arches with Alpenslog and Eldon once. It was very windy ,with 50 mph gusts. Nearly blew the damned tent away with us in it. We also hiked out beyond Dark Angel, though not as far as you went.
By the way, I like the figures you've been doing, Richard. I think you have a real talent for that. Always have, since the days back at the la grande house
-- Larry Darkness