arches national park: day two

after a good night's rest, we all felt much better in the morning. our motto for the day was to beat the heat. we made a game plan, ate some breakfast, and headed out.

warning: picture heavy post.

arches is an interesting park in that there really aren't too many long hikes. most of the hikes are less than a mile round trip. just to the arch and back. there are a few longer ones, but even those are around three miles round trip. we avoided those though, and stuck to the short ones, paying particular attention to whether they had shade and whether they had slick sections that would be hard for madeleine to navigate. fortunately, i had gathered lots of information before we left.

our first stop was sand dune arch. this was my favorite. you walk up that narrow ramp in the previous picture and come into a little sanctuary. it has a sandy floor and the sand was really cold when we were there in the morning. the area is shaded almost the entire day. it was just us and one other family, so it was perfect. 

this is the actual arch itself.

randy and madeleine climbed up into this little cove behind the arch.

diane already had sunscreen in her eyes and wasn't too happy, although she was handling the pack better than she had the day before, which i was worried about. 

randy and madeleine did a lot of climbing up these rocks. that's all madeleine wanted to do all day - climb big rocks. 

despite these last two pictures, diane was happy for the most part while we were here. 

 our next stop was skyline arch. just a short, half-mile round trip hike.

you can't tell from the pictures, but the pride beaming from madeleine's face is because she climbed up on this rock all by herself. 

we discovered two things about madeleine this weekend: she is a really good climber and doesn't seem to be bothered by intense heat. 

 

turret arch

 next, we hit the windows loop. it takes you past turret arch and the north and south windows. it was a short hike up a bunch of steps and when we got to the top there was some beautiful shade with a strong wind blowing through and a nice area for the girls to play around. rocks small enough for diane to climb on, too.

we stayed here for a long time and just let the girls play, snack, and drink lots of water.  we were water nazis the whole time. the girls each had their own nalgene bottles and we constantly stopped for drink breaks. we also put on spf 50 every hour and a half or so.

double arches

 you could see these arches from the parking lot for the windows hike, but we didn't actually hike over to them. diane was past nap time and we headed into the next phase of our plan: lots of driving around. 

cove of caves (i think...)

moab is only a couple miles away from arches and we had to gas up anyway, so we headed out of the park and into moab for a long drive. diane fell asleep while we were still in the park and slept for a long time. after driving around moab for a while, randy dropped madeleine and i off at an elementary school so that she could play on the playground and he kept driving around with diane. then we switched. not ideal, but it was the best way to get her to nap. it certainly wasn't going to happen in a 100 degree tent.

diane finally woke up and we headed back to the park to begin our trip back to the campsite. we stopped at all of the viewpoints, got out for just long enough that we didn't overheat, but enough to create a diversion for the girls and stretch our legs.

park avenue

 our first stop was park avenue and was a really beautiful viewpoint. if the hike hadn't been completely unshaded (goes down through the middle of that valley), i may have been tempted to hike it.

formations surrounding park avenue

 it's hard to get a sense of scale from these pictures, but these formations are huge and really are amazing to see in person.

more formations surrounding park avenue

the last actual little hike we did was the viewpoint for delicate arch, the most famous of all of the arches. i wish that we could have gotten closer to the arch, but before we even arrived at arches, we knew we wouldn't be doing the hike. it is one of the longer hikes, with no shade, slippery points, narrow ledges, and sharp drop-offs. definitely not our stage of life. plus, we knew that it would be really crowded.

our trail guide said that it was a 100 yard hike to the viewpoint, so we didn't take diane in the backpack. apparently there are two different viewpoints though. the lower one, which is 100 yards from the parking lot, and the upper one, which we went to. not a terrible hike, but steep and i would have liked the backpack. instead, i had diane on my shoulders and randy ended up with madeleine on hers.
 

 diane looked like this for most of the trip. our little ragamuffin. dirty onesie, greasy hair, and a little angry. although she really was happy almost the entire second day. i just couldn't bear making her wear shorts. i certainly didn't want to be wearing mine.

i made each of us stand in front of the arch - photographic evidence that we've been there.  since there was no shade at the top of the viewpoint, we headed back down pretty quickly.

  

we got back to the campground around 4:30 and let the girls play around the camp and in the tent. they did really well. i think it helped that they had had the entire day to acclimate to the heat. we pushed dinner back as far as we could for as long as they were happy and then as soon as dinner was over, we did another round of sponge baths and let them play in the tent until bed time. 

we debated whether to do another hike in the morning on saturday, but decided to just pack up and head home. we were tired and ready to get home and had seen most of the park that was accessible with small children. 

would i do it again? nope. not in june. not with small children. 

everything i read said that arches is a great family park and a fun place to camp with kids. they must have been camping in early spring or late fall, or have kids five and older. kids that can entertain themselves a little bit better.

it's too hard to camp without any water. the desert is no place for me and no place for small children. randy loves it. but not being able to cool down was too hard. if we did arches again tomorrow as a family - same temperature, etc. - the only way i would do it would be to have home base at a motel in moab and do early morning hiking, hang out at the motel pool and maybe even do some hiking in the late evening.

arches was beautiful and i'm glad i've seen it, but i could probably go the rest of my life and never return. i don't want it to sound like the whole trip was miserable, because we really did have a fun time. but it was hard. not my kind of camping. 

but no one got sunburned.