Arches and the Paleolithic Pee-Pee.

We’re staying in Moab, so Arches is practically right next door!

So convenient!

Arches is also a relatively large park, and the main road goes about 21 miles back into the hills. So, to visit specific sites and features within Arches, it is basically a driving tour on the way to little turnouts and shorter hikes to see various… you guessed it, arches.

Woohoo! Time to see some arches, balancing rocks, and some cool rock formations!

No National Park visit is complete without a visit to the visitor center. There are always quality souvenirs to spend our money on at each park.

Arches is particularly interesting, so we spent quite a bit of time learning about how arches are formed and the age of the rock formations in the area. Plus a bunch of other info that we don’t really remember well, but it was interesting, nonetheless.

Maya has successfully trained us to look for pressed penny machines wherever we go. We were sorta successful at the Arches visitor center. While the machine was apparently out of order, they had a few pre-pressed pennies that you could buy. So, we did. But they also had a little hand drawn map for three pressed penny machines in Moab, which turned into a little scavenger hunt for Maya, Chris and Hannah later that afternoon!

Also, no visit to a national park is complete without hitting the potty before a hike! We know the ground by us looks like one of us didn’t make it all the way into the potty, but we promise we actually made it.

Just a few miles from the entrance, we found our way to the appropriately named double arch, a short hike off of the main road, but just an awesome geological feature! We got some great shots and Chris and Maya got in a pretty strenuous little climb where the back of the cave just drops off apparently. That’s what we were told and we saw no need to go see for ourselves!

If you zoom in, Chris and Maya are up there and it gives you a bit of perspective on how large this arch was!

That’s Chris and Maya adventuring in the background. Hannah up front!

Hannah totally outed herself on this visit lol. Never pass up an opportunity to use the potty (we should seriously make some bumper stickers or something).

Hannah, Chris and Maya hiked all the way out to delicate arch, a 3.2 mile hike with about 550 feet of elevation gain. We made it most of the way to almost halfway before somebody’s GI tract said “nope, uh-uh, it’s here or it’s back at the trailhead, no further.” Considering there were so many people on the trail and there was nowhere to hide due to the trail being ALL ROCK, the old people (🙄 us) in our group were forced to turn around.

So, we quickly mosied back to the trailhead and took care of business. Once business was taken care of and the situation was stabilized, we thought as long as we are back here waiting for kids to finish the hike, we can get in some stretching, calisthenics and… ok we took a nap.

The kids had fun up at Delicate though!

Now, for our favorite feature of the park…

If you followed our adventures in 2023, you knew this was coming.

Ben and I couldn’t help ourselves the last time we visited Arches and saw this rock formation.

It had not changed much since we last saw it 3 years ago. Aren’t you supposed to call a doctor if it lasts more than four hours?

I think this particular rock formation speaks for itself, so we shall move on…

Not only did we spend most of the day at Arches hiking and seeing arches (duh), it’s also a great place for star-gazing. After dinner and a swim at the RV park pool, we went back up into Arches around 10 pm (WAY past Ben’s bedtime!) to see what we could see. Our last stargazing visit to Arches was incredible. 🔭 Unfortunately, the moon was pretty bright and about 70% full, so it washed out a lot of the stars on this visit and the pics look more like daylight than nighttime. We still had a peaceful evening under the stars, watching satellites cruise by overhead.