ARCHES NATIONAL PARK

Friday night the varsity scouts took a trip to Arches. Aaron and I went as leaders and we had 5 boys go. We had my van filled to capacity, both with passengers and cargo. Aaron and I had plenty of room in the front, not sure about the boys.



We picked the guys up from school to get a good early start so that we could get there, find a site, and go hiking that night.

Our first delay was snow falling all thru Spanish Fork Canyon with it piling up on Soldier Summit, but it didn't set us back too much. We then stopped for some food in Price, we dropped a few boys off at Burger King and the rest of us went to Wendy's only to have to wait FOREVER for food. I don't think they do "fast" food in Price. Finally, we found our way back on the road. A few miles outside of Price, traffic came to a standstill. There was a vehicle fire that caused them to close the road in both directions. We could see cars and trucks stopped ahead for a couple miles, so we enjoyed the time of turning the car off and getting out for some stretching, socializing with other motorists and running around.
The road opened and we were on our way, with a pause to take a picture of the cause of the delay.


We drove into Arches around 7 pm, about an hour after we had planned to. The campground in the park was full. I had expected this so late in the day, so I had lists of BLM campsites. (I had called BLM a few weeks ago, and they thought there should be tons of available sites on the date we were going, even at the hour we were arriving). Well, we headed out on our campsite quest. We looked at every site along the Colorado River (probably 15 different campgrounds with 10-20 sites in each). We even did some partial off-roading with using the van to ford a stream 3 times over and then we had to turn around and go back out. At 9:30, after determining all sites were full, we found a boat launch a ways off the road. We decided that was the only option, so we drove in and made camp. We couldn't do a fire since it was a no camping area. We were tired so only 2 boys put up a tent, the rest of us enjoyed the night under the stars. We were all up at 5 and ready to start hiking since our previous evening plans had been foiled. You can take a survey, but I don't think anyone will claim they had a great night's sleep : )

Upon entering the park, Aaron insisted we do the hike to Delicate Arch first (the one we had wanted to do the night before). We started just before 7 with only one other car in the parking lot. It was an awesome hike, as we had it all pretty much to ourselves. I had never been to the park and admit this was an impressive site. We then went to Devil's Garden, which had a few more people on the way up. Coming down the trail though, we were bombarded with people. It was a very busy day. We made a few more stops and hikes. We estimate that by the end of the day we hiked between 10 and 12 miles. Needless to say my legs are still feeling it. We had a great time and arrived home by 8. It made me grateful for the awesome group of young men we have to work with.