Arches National Park, UT

September 8^th 14

You know you’re pulling into a National Park when you see an intimidatingly long traffic jam before the entrance.  Loads of curious tourists from all over the world are just waiting for the ‘drives of their lives’.  It is disappointing.  This really is a thing that always makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, feeling that I’m losing my freedom as we're pulling into the park.  Wherever we go, we go there with other tourists wearing flip-flops, constantly bumping into each other, rushing through the national parks’ “cattle corridors”, just to take a picture of whatever monument they want and leave.  In worse case, and unfortunately quite often, they only roll down the window of their rented SUVs to take a pic and carry on driving.  Don’t get me wrong but that is my most common experience from National Parks in the US.

But there’s always so much more to it than just that.  Our luck got better though.  Well sort of.  As we walked down the path trying to avoid being dodged by the crowds of eager tourists, we realised there is a “Primitive trail – Difficult hike” pathway.  Judging by the sign, this won’t be that appealing to those guys wearing flip-flops or their fancy clothing.  So we made a turn.  We started joking that it is actually very easy hike, there’s just sandy surface.  But as we carried on walking, kind of unprepared, considering we are still in the desert and have no water on us cause we didn’t even hope to discover anything like that.  It turned out to be an excellent hike. Nothing too difficult but when it surprises you with no water supply on you it gets quite strenuous.  The beauty, however, and the fact that you finally avoid those fashionable, leisure “hikers/photographers” makes you almost forget about the neglected water.

We saw all those famous arches such as Double O, Landscape, Black and Skyline Arches.  They were all fascinating.  As we got to the Double O arch we kind of lost the trail marks and ended up descending a narrow cave that lead us to the very edge of the boulders.  One of the most amazing panoramic views that we got to see in the Arches National Park.  A great green and orange like dusty plateau with occasional boulders, towers and sandstone fins spread all over the place.  We, however, figured that it didn’t lead anywhere and eventually returned to the original trail, which lead us through the landscape of forming arches.

Returning back to the mainstream area didn’t even bother us anymore.  We were thirsty enough not to care about the crowds and as we got back to the parking lot we kind of pitied the people stumbling in their flip-flops that carried a memory of a crowded place in their solid professional cameras and didn’t even have enough time to appreciate the hidden beauties of the National Park views.

More Pics to See HERE