day 5: driving and Moab, Utah

We woke up and kept driving through New Mexico which was beautiful and definitely the desert.  It is so different from the landscapes we're used to.

New Mexico

Once we reached Moab, Utah (4.5 hours later) we found a Wendy's and ate lunch, then drove to Arches National Park and began hiking.  We began hiking Devil's Garden, which a friend (Jessie) recommended to us, it was a good trail.  We took a primitive trail which really means the trail is really poorly marked.  It was very confusing at one point and we kept running into dead ends, which was extremely frustrating.  We retraced our steps and began the trail from another point.  It had really incredible views!

 That's John out there on that ledge, about gave me a heart attack.

 

 an arch

I couldn't get over how different the trails were from the ones we would hike in the mountains out east.  You're basically hiking up huge stone (boulder) mountains and the trails are just sand.  My mouth was extremely dry with sand and dust.  I had a little trouble catching my breath what with the elevation change and all (over a mile high).  But the views were really awesome and I was quite proud of some of the things I hiked.

Double Arch

Once we were finished with Devil's Garden (4+ hours later) we drove to Delicate Arch, which Jessie recommended we hike right before sunset. We booked it up the trail (1.5 miles completely uphill) so we could get good pictures of the sunset.  I kept wondering when the heck we were going to get there because it felt like it was taking so long for a short hike plus I'm sure I was tired from the previous 10 miles of fast paced hiking earlier. 

We got to Delicate Arch and it was beautiful!

Delicate Arch at sunset

It's truly incredible that things like this exist and that they are natural formations. We took some pictures, rested a bit and decided to walk back before it got dark.  We were pretty tired by the end of the day (9 pm).  We drove to an ice cream shop (also recommended by Jessie) and each got a huge waffle cone of ice cream.  I didn't even feel a little guilty about the calories :).  

We decided to stay at a campground as opposed to a hotel so we could practice setting up our tent and cooking dinner on our camp stove.  It was about 10 pm by that time and a little harder to do it all in the dark but we did it!  We were exhausted and went to sleep after everything was clean.