Day 3: Monday Morning
We tried to get into Arches National Park at 8:00 a.m., but the Parks Service had already shut down the park and told people to try again in 3-5 hours. I’d be lying if I said Kristy and I didn’t have a moment of sheer panic. Arches was the main reason we took this trip, and that would have been just a crushing disappointment not to get into the park. We did eventually get there, but we decided to do something else in the morning and hope the crowds would eventually thin out. Canyonlands went a long way toward melting away our frustrations and worry.
Canyonlands National Park preserves 337,598 acres of mesas, canyons, buttes, arches, and spires in the Moab region of Utah. Water and gravity have sculpted the land for hundreds of thousands of years, creating a beautifully vivid desert expanse that stretches out seemingly forever in all directions.
We stayed primarily in the Island in the Sky area — a mesa region that sprawls along sheer sandstone cliffs rising up over 1,000 feet above the surrounding land. The sights are unreal, and the hiking is worth the toll on feet and legs. We started with a short hike to Mesa Arch, which was a pretty fantastic appetizer for the arches we’d see later in the day. We ended with a hike up to the top of Whale Rock (which looks like a beached whale on top of the mesa), and we just kind of sat and looked around in quiet wonder. Because that’s really all you can do in a place where time and natural splendor dwarf our brief lives here on earth. It’s truly a sublime experience.
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