Today we leave Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park for Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. These two parks are extremely close to each other, so we will be staying here for 5 days as we explore both parks. The next few blog posts will go back and forth between the parks.

Before we leave for the morning, we had some visitors to our campsite. If you read our last post, you know that deer are supposed to be common in our campground. We had seen a couple in the days prior, but this morning we had 4 deer come right up to our campsite! Two of them were very pregnant! It was so cool 🙂

 

Our check in time for our campsite is 12:30, and the drive is short, so we dilly dally a little in the morning so we don’t arrive too early. The drive into Utah is beautiful! Desert and rocky and hot, but beautiful! We are staying at Archview RV Resort, which is right on route 191. This is super convenient as Arches is less than a 10 minute drive and the road to get to Canyonlands is right across the street from us! We normally don’t like staying at RV resorts (our experience last summer at Yosemite was much less than ideal), but all of the campsites inside the national parks were full when we booked-and they are also completely closed now due to COVID-19! We lucked out that we had to choose somewhere to stay outside the park. This campground is super clean and convenient, has full hook ups (which is awesome so we can use the air conditioning!), and even has showers and laundry for us to use! If you don’t have a camper, you can tent camp or rent a little house thing to stay in!

 

We were pretty hungry upon arriving to our campsite, so we unhooked quickly and drove into Moab. We found a Mexican restaurant called Fiesta Mexicana, and it was awesome! We haven’t eaten in a restaurant since early March, so we were a little nervous, but the staff and restaurant had great standards. Everyone was wearing a mask and gloves and they sat us far away from other people. The food was quick and delicious! I want to know how they make their red sauce for their burritos! The salsa was amazing and smoky!

 

After lunch, we headed to the Island in the Sky section of Canyonlands National Park. There are 4 sections to Canyonlands; Island in the Sky is the most popular and easy to get to. We plan on visiting the Needles section as well in the coming days. The other two sections are hard to get to. The Maze and Horseshoe Canyon sections have no paved roads to get to them, and are just super out of the way. Maybe some other time if we have more time we will visit them!

We headed to the Visitor Center where we checked out a cool viewing area. Scott gets really nervous if I get “close” to any edges, so he generally hangs back while I check things out a little closer. He even sent a picture to his mom “telling” on me for getting too close to the edge 😛

Our first stop is to hike to Mesa Arch. Pretty quick and easy hike to get to a really cool arch! Plus, this is a viewing area for the Washer Woman arch. Scott and I have a debate going on about the Washer Woman, as he does not believe it looks like anything. What are your thoughts?

 

After Mesa and Washer Woman, we drove up the scenic drive some. There was something called Whale Rock, and Scott pulled over. We had no idea what it was, so we wanted to check it out! It turned out to be a really cool 1 mile hike in which we scaled this MASSIVE rock (I mean, it’s called Whale Rock for a reason). Canyonlands is super windy, so we kept having to take our hats off or risk them being blown off! This hike was really fun and a must-do if you come to Canyonlands!

 

We got back in the truck and headed for our last hike of the day, Upheaval Dome. Upheaval Dome is a 3 mile wide crater in the ground with unknown origins. There are two major theories behind it: Erosion of a salt dome, or a meteorite impact with erosion occurring afterwards. Either way, pretty cool. There are two viewing areas. The first is about a mile hike, the second one is about two miles. We decided to do both! We got some great views of the crater. This hike was a little strenuous and you have to be comfortable climbing and scaling rocks!

 

We ended the day by driving to the Grand View point, where you get a great view of the White Rim Road- a 100 mile dirt/gravel road that you can drive through. They recommend you do it in two days, and camp one night in the desert. We didn’t do this drive, but it’s something we both want to come back and do! We also stopped at Buck Canyon overlook, to get one last view of the Island in the Sky section of Canyonlands. One thing we have learned already about Canyonlands National Park is that it truly is a hikers’ park. The trails we did were relatively short and easy for us to do. There are much more difficult and lengthy hikes in Canyonlands than short hikes. Most hikes are 10+ miles, which we weren’t planning on doing this trip (summer is HOT in Utah! It’s been 95+ degrees every day).

 

Tomorrow, we are getting up SUPER early to hike at Arches National Park. This is a more popular park, and we want to get in early to be able to beat the crowds! Stay tuned!