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ilanaramaFinally, the fourth and last (and maybe best!) part of our spring 2024 vacation trips! As some of you know we used to live in Boulder (which is where Britt and I met, actually); we're still friends with quite a few people we knew in those days, and every once in a while they invite us on a trip, or vice versa. This time, they'd gotten reservations for a group campsite at Arches National Park in mid-May. We hadn't been to Arches for years (I was last there 15 years ago, and it had been even longer for Britt) so it seemed like a good excuse!
We left Durango a day early so we could do a little mountain biking on the Navajo Rocks trails, which are about halfway up the road to Canyonlands from the main highway. It was a lot warmer than it had been when we'd been in the area a month earlier, and I overheated pretty quickly...then we got caught in a thunderstorm, waiting it out under a rock overhang and shivering with the sudden temperature drop...and then the temperature was, finally, perfect!
We found a nice quiet campsite on a side road and enjoyed a spectacular sunset:
The next morning, we headed for Arches. Neither of us had been there since the timed-entry system had been put in place; to enter the park, you need an advance reservation for a specific time, unless you have a campsite reservation, in which case you can go in whenever. They do this to keep the line at the gate from being ridiculously long, though it still ends up being moderately long, and we waited maybe half an hour in line before arriving at the gate. Unfortunately the gate ranger didn't recognize the name of the group camping area and kept telling us that it was at Canyonlands, not at Arches, and we argued for ten minutes before he finally let us in, argh.
We had a reservation not only for the group campsite, but for a special hiking area that is restricted to 75 people/day: the Fiery Furnace. Britt had remembered hearing about it and while planning our trip out there, he'd seen the permit requirement and snagged one for us, since our friends had a longer drive and wouldn't be arriving until later that day. This required us to go to the visitor's center to watch an instructional video about safety and the rules for preservation of the landscape, which we duly did. Then we got our official permit and parking tag and headed for our adventure!
The Fiery Furnace is a labyrinth of twisty little sandstone passages, all different :-) There is not really a trail; the recommended route is marked by very occasional (and easy-to-miss) small marker arrows, but there are a lot of possible paths across the rock and sandy washes. There are occasional "DEAD END" signs, which we soon learned meant "you can't go far this way, but if you do you will see something spectacular if you happen to look in the right place!" Because of the high sandstone walls, GPS is not recommended, but I did keep my Garmin on during our hike and the track wasn't too bad:
The main thing that having the GPS helped with was that we had a Gaia map with several arches and other features marked, so we could often guess where a particular "dead end" pathway led. This is how we found "Skull Arch". (Well, it took us a while! We followed the wrong wash, first. But eventually we saw a small cairn and scrambled up a rock to a slightly higher passageway to a big sandy chamber, and Britt looked at the map and said, "it should be around here somewhere," and I looked up and said, "...OH."
We saw a lot of rocks with holes in them!
And a lot of pillars and fins! (The one in the middle of the next photo looks like it has the huge fingers of a giant's white hand reaching up from behind the pillar. Just look at the zoom photo!)
And just a lot of nifty terrain to squeeze through and clamber over:
It was a super fun hike and I very much recommend it! The permit limit means that while you occasionally see another group, mostly you're just on your own. And it is very easy to miss a marker and get lost - some of our backtracking was due to exploring, but some of it was due to missing a turn and ending up at an impassible drop or a wall. So you definitely have to be comfortable with figuring things out by yourself.
After the Fiery Furnace, we proceeded to the campsite, but nobody else had arrived, so we went on another hike. From the camp, it's possible to make a loop of about 3.6 miles to view four arches: Skyline (which is pretty much right over the group campsite!), Tapestry, Broken, and Sand Dune.
We got back to the campsite to see our friends arriving, and had a pleasant evening catching up and making plans for the next day. In the morning, after a leisurely breakfast, we drove with Paul and Leslie to the Devil's Garden trailhead. It was already jam-packed with cars, which was not a good sign.
The trail starts by passing between two large rock fins. Just after we emerged into the open, we took the little side hike on the right to Tunnel Arch and Pine Tree Arch:
Then we rejoined the crowd on the main trail towards Landscape Arch - and alas, it really was a crowd, though I suppose that's typical for national parks. But because there were so many people, we decided to take the "primitive trail" that branches off from the main trail shortly before Landscape Arch, to make the Devil's Garden loop counter-clockwise; by the time we looped back to the more touristed trail it would be later in the day and we hoped there'd be fewer people.
Unlike the wide and graded main trail, the primitive trail was narrow and sandy for the first mile, with a few steep downhills. And only a few people coming in the other direction! We skirted the sandstone fins and pinnacles, keeping them to our left, until the trail hit a wide dry wash and we turned left, up the canyon. At a marked side trail for Private Arch we turned left again, hiking up and into the sandstone formations. It wasn't completely private - we saw several other hikers, though nothing like the masses on the main trail - but it was definitely an arch:
We took a lunch break here in the shade of some scrubby bushes, then retraced our steps out to the wash. This is where the real consequence of our choice to go counter-clockwise became apparent as we followed cairns to the base of a slab where, above us, a long line of all the people who were going clockwise (apparently the "correct" direction!) carefully descended a small depression in the rock to its end, about 5 feet above the sandy ground, and then slid or jumped to the ground. While rock scrambling up is easier than rock scrambling down, that first step was a doozy. Leslie and I, too short to reach a good hold from the ground, needed boosting, but once we got up we had to go past the line of people...fortunately the rock was at a shallow enough angle that we former rock-climbers could make it up without the aid of the depression that the down-climbers were using, but I think we annoyed everyone as we came up past them, oops!
We continued along the trail to a steep climb that deposited us at the incredibly beautiful Double O Arch:
That lower hole was so inviting I had to climb through, and once I did I saw a clear path up and around to what I knew would be a good view. In fact it was so good that when the rest of my group followed, I told them, "Come up to where I am! And don't look back until you get here!" They duly obeyed, and when they turned around, they were rewarded with this absolutely magnificent view, probably my favorite of the whole trip:
From there we climbed up to a really nifty ridge along a sandstone fin:
Now we were seeing a lot of other hikers! We turned off the main trail to visit Partition Arch:
And Navajo Arch:
and then retraced our steps back to the main trail, where we finally saw Landscape Arch (which is probably not long for this world; it's much thinner now after a major rockfall in 1991) before heading back to the trailhead and our van, and then back up to the campsite.
The next morning it was time to pack up and leave. As our drive home was only 3 hours (compared to the 5.5 our Boulder friends had) we decided to visit some of the other arches along the way, and stopped at the Windows parking area to do the Windows Trail hike. First we went to Double Arch, which is basically at the parking lot:
Then we walked around the parking lot and struck out on the Windows Sand Loop Trail to come up to the Windows from the backside:
Here's Britt sitting in the South Window - you can see Turret Arch in the background:
Then we hiked around the edge of the trail and looked through the Windows from the other, more populated side, before continuing along the trail to Turret Arch:
You can definitely see by the various bodies scattered around that we were back on the tourist trail here! Still, it was really great to revisit Arches NP after so many years, and to hike a little with old friends. Apparently getting a group camp one year gives you priority for requesting it for the next, so we may be doing it again next year!
32 photos mostly of rocks with holes in them, no blah blah
We left Durango a day early so we could do a little mountain biking on the Navajo Rocks trails, which are about halfway up the road to Canyonlands from the main highway. It was a lot warmer than it had been when we'd been in the area a month earlier, and I overheated pretty quickly...then we got caught in a thunderstorm, waiting it out under a rock overhang and shivering with the sudden temperature drop...and then the temperature was, finally, perfect!
We found a nice quiet campsite on a side road and enjoyed a spectacular sunset:
The next morning, we headed for Arches. Neither of us had been there since the timed-entry system had been put in place; to enter the park, you need an advance reservation for a specific time, unless you have a campsite reservation, in which case you can go in whenever. They do this to keep the line at the gate from being ridiculously long, though it still ends up being moderately long, and we waited maybe half an hour in line before arriving at the gate. Unfortunately the gate ranger didn't recognize the name of the group camping area and kept telling us that it was at Canyonlands, not at Arches, and we argued for ten minutes before he finally let us in, argh.
We had a reservation not only for the group campsite, but for a special hiking area that is restricted to 75 people/day: the Fiery Furnace. Britt had remembered hearing about it and while planning our trip out there, he'd seen the permit requirement and snagged one for us, since our friends had a longer drive and wouldn't be arriving until later that day. This required us to go to the visitor's center to watch an instructional video about safety and the rules for preservation of the landscape, which we duly did. Then we got our official permit and parking tag and headed for our adventure!
The Fiery Furnace is a labyrinth of twisty little sandstone passages, all different :-) There is not really a trail; the recommended route is marked by very occasional (and easy-to-miss) small marker arrows, but there are a lot of possible paths across the rock and sandy washes. There are occasional "DEAD END" signs, which we soon learned meant "you can't go far this way, but if you do you will see something spectacular if you happen to look in the right place!" Because of the high sandstone walls, GPS is not recommended, but I did keep my Garmin on during our hike and the track wasn't too bad:
The main thing that having the GPS helped with was that we had a Gaia map with several arches and other features marked, so we could often guess where a particular "dead end" pathway led. This is how we found "Skull Arch". (Well, it took us a while! We followed the wrong wash, first. But eventually we saw a small cairn and scrambled up a rock to a slightly higher passageway to a big sandy chamber, and Britt looked at the map and said, "it should be around here somewhere," and I looked up and said, "...OH."
We saw a lot of rocks with holes in them!
And a lot of pillars and fins! (The one in the middle of the next photo looks like it has the huge fingers of a giant's white hand reaching up from behind the pillar. Just look at the zoom photo!)
And just a lot of nifty terrain to squeeze through and clamber over:
It was a super fun hike and I very much recommend it! The permit limit means that while you occasionally see another group, mostly you're just on your own. And it is very easy to miss a marker and get lost - some of our backtracking was due to exploring, but some of it was due to missing a turn and ending up at an impassible drop or a wall. So you definitely have to be comfortable with figuring things out by yourself.
After the Fiery Furnace, we proceeded to the campsite, but nobody else had arrived, so we went on another hike. From the camp, it's possible to make a loop of about 3.6 miles to view four arches: Skyline (which is pretty much right over the group campsite!), Tapestry, Broken, and Sand Dune.
We got back to the campsite to see our friends arriving, and had a pleasant evening catching up and making plans for the next day. In the morning, after a leisurely breakfast, we drove with Paul and Leslie to the Devil's Garden trailhead. It was already jam-packed with cars, which was not a good sign.
The trail starts by passing between two large rock fins. Just after we emerged into the open, we took the little side hike on the right to Tunnel Arch and Pine Tree Arch:
Then we rejoined the crowd on the main trail towards Landscape Arch - and alas, it really was a crowd, though I suppose that's typical for national parks. But because there were so many people, we decided to take the "primitive trail" that branches off from the main trail shortly before Landscape Arch, to make the Devil's Garden loop counter-clockwise; by the time we looped back to the more touristed trail it would be later in the day and we hoped there'd be fewer people.
Unlike the wide and graded main trail, the primitive trail was narrow and sandy for the first mile, with a few steep downhills. And only a few people coming in the other direction! We skirted the sandstone fins and pinnacles, keeping them to our left, until the trail hit a wide dry wash and we turned left, up the canyon. At a marked side trail for Private Arch we turned left again, hiking up and into the sandstone formations. It wasn't completely private - we saw several other hikers, though nothing like the masses on the main trail - but it was definitely an arch:
We took a lunch break here in the shade of some scrubby bushes, then retraced our steps out to the wash. This is where the real consequence of our choice to go counter-clockwise became apparent as we followed cairns to the base of a slab where, above us, a long line of all the people who were going clockwise (apparently the "correct" direction!) carefully descended a small depression in the rock to its end, about 5 feet above the sandy ground, and then slid or jumped to the ground. While rock scrambling up is easier than rock scrambling down, that first step was a doozy. Leslie and I, too short to reach a good hold from the ground, needed boosting, but once we got up we had to go past the line of people...fortunately the rock was at a shallow enough angle that we former rock-climbers could make it up without the aid of the depression that the down-climbers were using, but I think we annoyed everyone as we came up past them, oops!
We continued along the trail to a steep climb that deposited us at the incredibly beautiful Double O Arch:
That lower hole was so inviting I had to climb through, and once I did I saw a clear path up and around to what I knew would be a good view. In fact it was so good that when the rest of my group followed, I told them, "Come up to where I am! And don't look back until you get here!" They duly obeyed, and when they turned around, they were rewarded with this absolutely magnificent view, probably my favorite of the whole trip:
From there we climbed up to a really nifty ridge along a sandstone fin:
Now we were seeing a lot of other hikers! We turned off the main trail to visit Partition Arch:
And Navajo Arch:
and then retraced our steps back to the main trail, where we finally saw Landscape Arch (which is probably not long for this world; it's much thinner now after a major rockfall in 1991) before heading back to the trailhead and our van, and then back up to the campsite.
The next morning it was time to pack up and leave. As our drive home was only 3 hours (compared to the 5.5 our Boulder friends had) we decided to visit some of the other arches along the way, and stopped at the Windows parking area to do the Windows Trail hike. First we went to Double Arch, which is basically at the parking lot:
Then we walked around the parking lot and struck out on the Windows Sand Loop Trail to come up to the Windows from the backside:
Here's Britt sitting in the South Window - you can see Turret Arch in the background:
Then we hiked around the edge of the trail and looked through the Windows from the other, more populated side, before continuing along the trail to Turret Arch:
You can definitely see by the various bodies scattered around that we were back on the tourist trail here! Still, it was really great to revisit Arches NP after so many years, and to hike a little with old friends. Apparently getting a group camp one year gives you priority for requesting it for the next, so we may be doing it again next year!
32 photos mostly of rocks with holes in them, no blah blah