Arches National Park

This was the first of 11 (!) National Parks that we visited in our nearly 3 weeks of traveling before the Grand Canyon. I REALLY liked this one, because of all the time we were able to take through it, as well as all the variety of arches and land forms contained within it.

Morning light (just before the 7 mile hike I previously wrote about):

Cool erosion along that trail:

A tiny spot of beauty along the trail -

That evening we went back into the park (after chilling at the apartment we rented, through the heat of the day) to catch evening light on the rocks.

That was how it started, and then it progressed…

I took this next picture just because the light was pretty and the hills in back were nice. I then found out later when I looked at it on the computer, that I got the backside of Turret Arch (at the left side of the picture):

This was the “front” side of Turret Arch, the next evening…

…when the clouds obscured the sunset light (after we got there an hour before sunset, to capture the “magical” light). :( This was the best picture I got of Windows -

It was the previous evening that gave me tons of neat lighting photos, like this one of Balanced Rock:

Just as the sun was disappearing -

…there was a small shower over the nearby hills:

We saved the most famous arch in the park for our last evening - Delicate Arch. It required a 1.5 mile fairly strenuous hike to reach. Unfortunately, earlier that day, Steve sprained his ankle pretty severely. He was still determined to see this arch, so sent me ahead to walk at my usual brisk pace, and said he’d catch up to me. As I was nearing the last curve of the trail -

…there were literally gale force winds (with gusts that nearly blew me over) coming up the bowl in front of the arch.

I very carefully crawled my way over the lip and dropped down out of the wind to take some pictures.

That person (above) was crouched down to minimize the wind blasts coming up out of the canyon. There was a line of people waiting to get their picture taken under the arch:

To end this post, I’ll share my favorite Delicate Arch picture (timed just right to avoid a person in it!).