Go Around the Bend: Awesome Arches, Mountain Bike Madness, and True Insanity

Arches National Park contains the world’s largest concentration of natural stone arches in the world – over 2000 of them! (And I will be showing you photos of each one of them! Just joking! Lol.) To be considered an arch – a formation must meet three criteria, 1) the arch is a continuous span of stone 2) you can see light through it, and 3) at least one dimension (height or width) is 3 feet or more. Each arch is unique; they vary from tiny little openings to huge spans hundreds of feet long, some are single, doubles, slender, wide, the variety is endless!

North and South Window Arches.

We knew there was a road construction project underway in the national park, so we hit the visitor’s center on Tuesday, 5/2, to find out just what to expect. The good news, the construction isn’t causing much in the way of traffic delays. The bad news, because they’re doing a lot of the work at night everybody has to be OUT of the park by 7pm Sunday-Thursday AND they have whole sections of the park completely closed. The Devil’s Garden hike we wanted to do – nope. Landscape Arch (at 290 feet, the largest in the park), not accessible. In fact, about a third of the park was off limits, I guess we’ll just have to make a return trip to see what we missed!

Luckily, there are still plenty of arches to see and we did manage to score tickets for the Saturday morning Ranger-led hike into the Fiery Furnace. We decided to do about half the scenic drive and a couple of the shorter hikes today and then spend all day in the park again on Saturday.

Turret Arch with the La Sal Mountains behind.

In addition to the arches, there are plenty of other interesting features. Towering red rock walls, spires, and fins, a huge section of petrified sand dunes, and fantastic views of mesa, canyons and mountains. Yeah, definitely enough to keep us busy. 😊

Garden of Eden.

Beautiful view across the petrified dunes into the valley.

Love the contorted formations.

Our first short hike was out to Double Arch, from there we walked to Turret Arch and North and South Windows. This is a very popular park and the trails and overlooks are busy. We saw a sign for a “primitive trail” that went behind the Windows arches and followed it. It was deserted! I think we passed two people on the whole trail, quite a change from the hordes just on the other side of the formation. From now on, we are hunting for those primitive trails! Lol.

Double Arch.

Double Arch and surrounding formations.

Turret Arch.

Desert Rose scents the air on the deserted primitive trail. Lovely!

We finished up our day at Balanced Rock. Rog loves balanced rocks, not sure what about defying gravity appeals to him, but he finds them fascinating. (We are talking about a guy who used to jump out of perfectly good airplanes. Lol.) The giant boulder on top of Balanced Rock is a harder type of sandstone from one geological era sitting on pedestal of softer stone from an older era. Eventually the softer layer will completely erode and the balanced rock will come tumbling down. But not this week. Lol. This one is a biggy. The formation is 128’ tall and the boulder doing the balancing act is 55’ tall and weighs 3,500 tons! Wow.

Same rock, different perspectives.

After leaving the park, we headed into Moab to see about renting two mountain bikes for tomorrow. Rog is still interested in trying out a few more bikes before making a final decision AND I’m going to give crazy a try. As you know, I am a solid Rails-to-Trails kind of gal. My idea of single track is 8 feet wide and paved. I heal slowly, scar easily, and bruise if you look at me cross-eyed. So why, you ask, am I doing this??? Because you can get so much further out into some fantastic country on a mountain bike. I’ve listened to Rog rave about the gorgeous places he goes that are just too far out to hike and I want to go too! The downside to those paved bike paths is that they typically parallel a busy road and don’t go into the wilds. I guess pavement and wilderness are sort of mutually exclusive, aren’t they? Sigh.

So we arrived bright and early Wednesday morning at Poison Spider Cyclery to pick up two Ibis full suspension bikes. We brought them back to the RV and rode from there to the Klondike Bluff trail system. Although he hadn’t ridden them yet, Rog assured me that from the trail descriptions, these were going to be easy, beginner trails. He showed me a picture of the trail online – flat, wide, easy. No problem. Ok, so there was ONE small section like that, but the rest of it, not so much. Lol. The trail we started on was actually rated beginner-intermediate. We went up, down, around, through a boulder field, along the edge of a steep drop off – it was quite an introduction. You would have found my inner dialog hilarious as I navigated the obstacles and invoked a wide array of deities both large and small. Lol.

Momma on a mountain bike.

To increase my anxiety levels, the bike I was on cost over $6K! After signing multiple waivers and damage agreements, I was scared to death I’d crash and damage its precious carbon fiber frame. The one time I did go down, I was much more worried about the bike than me. Besides, a big boulder next to the trial was kind enough to break my fall. (Is the sarcasm coming through there? 😊) In truth, the bike was amazing. Once I started to trust it, I was astounded at what you can ride over without dying (or falling down). Lol. When we got to the turnaround point, Rog went on to do a couple of the more advanced trails while I took the easy way back on a 4x4 road. Now that part of the ride was fun, still some uppy-downy and rocks to bounce over, but nothing scary. Altogether, I rode for 4-5 hours and will probably upgrade to a full suspension bike too. Although I have no interest in a fancy carbon fiber, mortgage your house, bike. I’m thinking a good entry-level bike, maybe something with training wheels. 😊

On the trail.

Rog stops to admire the view.

Note the drop off, it felt closer than it looks. Lol.

Why mountain bike? No paved trails here, that's why.

Thursday, 5/4, we traded bikes for boots with a hike to Fisher Towers where we saw some seriously crazy people. Rog had read about a great hike in an area of fantastically huge monoliths favored by the truly crazy, otherwise known as climbers. For (relatively) sane people like us, it’s a scenic 4-mile hike that winds between massive red-rock towers with spectacular views of the canyon valleys. For (totally) insane people it’s a great place to climb hundreds of feet up sheer rock walls. I didn’t even like watching them, seriously, my palms get sweaty just looking at the pictures! I’m game to try a lot of things, but that isn’t anywhere near the realm of possibility. At least these guys were using ropes, the free climbers are a whole ‘nother level of crazy.