Day 11:
Our second day in Moab started early, with us leaving for Arches National Park at 6:30am. Arches has been very popular this year and its parking lots and trailheads often fill before 8:30am, sometimes by 7:30, and then there's a 3-5 hour wait to get in so we weren't taking any chances. The entrance to Arches, which was less than 5 minutes from our RV park, starts with a switchback road to climb the cliff to the mesa above. Our original plan was to drive to the furthest point in the park and work our way back, but I didn't stick to that. We stopped at Balanced Rock, a huge 50-foot-tall boulder sitting atop, and still attached to, the column supporting it. While we were there, a woman approached us and told us that she had dropped her husband off at the Delicate Arch trail head and then driven to Balanced Rock, but she had since turned the car off and realized that he still had the keys and now had no way to go pick him up, and he didn't know where she had gone. On top of that, they had no cell service and could not communicate. She asked us to take a message to the rangers at Delicate Arch to relay to her husband, so we did our good deed for the day and drove to the parking area for the trail head. The ranger there knew immediately what we were talking about and she had the car keys on a carabiner on her belt. We took them back to the wife at Balanced Rock so she could be reunited with her husband. The next stop was the Double Arch and North and South Windows section of the park, including Turret Arch. It is simply amazing to be able to walk up to and stand under these natural products of erosion and see their full scale! From there we drove back to Delicate Arch again so we could see it for ourselves. It was heading for 116 degrees in Moab yesterday, so we did not walk to trail that leads directly to the arch, opting instead for the overlook. Margo and I did walk to the upper overlook, which is closer to the actual arch, while mom stayed in the car with the AC on - she was literally melting from the heat. Finally, we drove out to the far north section with stops at Fiery Furnace, Sand Dune Arch and Broken Arch, Skyline Arch, and Devil's Garden. By the time we got that far out, it was too hot to do the 1.8 mile round-trip hike to Landscape Arch, and we didn't want to leave mom sitting in the car that long, so we headed back to the RV park to relax for a while. Unfortunately, the RV AC was losing its battle against the intense heat, so we drove back to Moab Brewery to have a beer and a share a monster Bavarian pretzel and cool off for a bit. This whole trip, we were seeing that many national parks are designated as International Dark Sky Parks because they have next to no artificial light in them at night. Friday night happened to be a new moon night, the perfect time for stargazing, so at 9pm we drove back into Arches to take advantage of the extra dark night sky. There were some clouds threatening to spoil the party but we kept driving and settled on the Balanced Rock parking lot to wait for the sky to be fully dark at 10:10pm. We were definitely not the only ones with this idea - the parking lot was almost full, and there were tons of other cars going further into the park. Several of the people near us had cameras mounted on tripods to photograph the night sky. We tried out the "night" setting on our phones and got a few good photos of the big dipper and other star clusters. We have never seen that many stars at home! Tomorrow we will head back into Colorado for just one more night on the road before ending up back in Broomfield to return the RV.
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