Sunday, May, 3.

It sprinkled a little during the night and this morning the sky was very gray and threatening. The weather forecast was for partly cloudy and 78 degrees so we packed up a lunch and drove to Arches National Park. The entrance is just 7 miles south of the RV Park.
The paved road starts off pretty nice with a set of switchbacks.

Then meanders through the Park. Besides arches there are many different formations that just begged to have their pictures taken so we did. The first was “The Three Gossips”

Most of the rest I don’t know the names of but here are some of them.





We took pictures of every arch that we didn’t have to hike to and that was quite a few. Some of which I know the names of, others I don’t.
I don’t know if this is an arch or just a hole in the rock.

This is the windows, which we can see from our RV site.

Double Arch.

I don’t know what this is called so I called it the “Owls Face”

This is called the Cove of Caves.

This one is “Delicate Arch” I don’t know why they call it that as it doesn’t look that delicate to me.

Sand Dune Arch.

Skyline Arch.

Skyline Arch, was at the end of the paved road. There were a couple more arches further along a trail but we didn’t get to those.
By the time we got to the end of the paved road I was getting kind of bored so we turned onto a dirt road that connects with a jeep trail that goes to Tower Arch and makes a loop back to “Balanced Rock” and the main road.

The first part of the dirt road was nice and wide but with a lot of washboard for about 7 miles then we turned left onto the jeep trail.
That is where the fun began.
It took three tries to get up the first really tough spot and it was pretty much rock crawling to the top of the first pass. We had lunch at the top overlooking the valley and the road on the other side.

The road looked pretty gnarly.

And after checking it out I decided that since we were alone and didn’t know the road or if we could get all the way through and if not I wasn’t sure if we could get back up this section. I decided to err on the side of caution and turn around.
We hadn’t gone very far when we saw a big Ford Expedition coming up the hill toward us so I backed in to a spot to let him by.
We talked to the guy (“Justin”, a nice young fellow in dreadlocks, who was taking a couple on a tour) if the road was passable all the way through and he told us that we had already gone over the worst part twice and once we got down off the pass it would be no problem. We asked him if we could follow him And he said “You see the sign on the truck?”

So we did.
We followed him over some rough assed trail, all the way to “Tower Arch”

And another arch that we don’t know the name of. I never thought to ask Justin the name.

We left Justin and his charges and continued on our way toward Balanced Rock and the pavement about 10 miles away. The going was rough at times but the scenery was great.

We passed the Whale’s Eye arch.

And made it to the pavement around 4:40 and were home by 5:30.
What a great trip!