Devil’s Garden

Sunrise in Devil's Garden, Arches National Park

Our original plans were to spend the three day weekend deep in the deserts of south west Utah, figuring it would be our last chance before the winter sets in and our attention turns to snow sports for good. The weather was ahead of us however and put a kabosh on those grandiose ideas so instead we headed to Arches National Park for a mini-break. Despite being only an hour and a half drive from the Grand Valley, it is not somewhere we have spent much time. Probably because it doesn't have any big hikes, allow mountain bikes and being a National Park it is generally swarming with tourists - big turn off for us. However, in the middle of November, on a gray day with bad weather in the forecast it is a different story. We pretty much had the place to ourselves.

Sure, we missed the trademark bluebird skies to accompany the red rock and set off the snow capped La Sal mountains in the distance, but we still had plenty of fun.

Given that we were making a quick overnight trip we headed straight to the Devil's Garden campground, secured a spot and then took off hiking into the Devil's Garden. There were several arches to see and play around in along the way.

Navajo Arch was small. I tried to see if I could jump up and reach the ceiling. Despite looking like Superwoman this was the highest I got:

The goofiness continued when we found a wall of rock with great holds for climbing. Despite not having any of the correct attire we had a little bouldering sesh:

More arches:

The Devil's Garden campground was one of the best in the NPS system we have ever stayed in. Great sites and amazing views (the first picture in this post was taken from our site - the opposite direction was the La Sal mountains). In the evening we watched the full moon rise through a haze of cloud and stoked a roaring fire to keep us warm.

The next day we headed back home, but stopped off to check out the new Moab Brand mountain bike trails on the way out. These are a relatively new, mostly singletrack, series of loops that remind me alot of the riding here in the Grand Valley. We rode just a few of them but had a blast and will definitely return to explore more fully.