West Trip Day 6 – Arches National Park

We headed back into Arches National Park for a second day.  After a brief stop on the drive in at Fiery Furnace, we headed to Landscape Arch, or rather, the trail head near it.  Prior to Landscape arch, we stopped at Pine Tree Arch, which as you may guess, is an arch with a  pine tree growing in it.  Landscape Arch is naturally an arch that lends itself well to being shown in landscape format (as opposed to portrait).  It’s also, I think, the most recent site of a collapse and the only one caught on picture.  Landscape Arch is open for distance viewing only from a defined path, maybe because of the recent collapse, maybe because it’s just kind of rough terrain to get to it.

After Landscape Arch, we continued around the trail which I think was about 7 miles total passing 5 or 6 other arches  I believe all of these, other than the upper of Double O Arch were open and could be wandered through and around.  The first were Navajo Arch and Partition Arch(es) followed by Double O Arch where Mooslie and Manatee made their daily appearance.   We skipped out on the side trail to Dark Angel after starting down the wrong path, but we did take the detour to Private Arch.  The trail kind of went along one set of fins, down into the Fin Canyon shown on the map, through another set of fins, followed a mostly dry river bed (not the Fin Canyon river shown on the map) around the backside of those fins and then went between the fins on the way back.  The hike along the ridge early on in the trail gave me my fill of heights for the day.

The hike took the majority of the day, at least the way we did it, with lots of stops for lots of pictures, which involved lots of tripod setups and takedowns.  On the way out of the park, we stopped back at Balancing Rock for sunset pictures.  We then noticed all the people, largely photographers, set up next to Balancing Rock.  We went to see what the deal was and realized it was a prime vantage point for taking pictures of multiple things in the 10 minute timeframe of perfect sunset lighting.

So, after doing what I  could to capture that lighting in picture, we headed out of Arches and toward Zion.

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About norconkm

I'm a person. I live in Grand Rapids, MI and work as an Electrical Engineer. My hobbies at the time of this writing are kayaking, skiing, archery, photography and maybe biking. As this is my personal blog, my hobbies are likely the primary topics about which you will be reading.

3 Responses to West Trip Day 6 – Arches National Park

  1. Janet says:

    I still say that some of these photos are much better that the ones the National Park uses on their literature. The second picture of the fiery furnace lookout (it IS the fiery furnace lookout); the colors are amazing…you even got the turquoise *mounds* in the landscape!

  2. norconkm says:

    You just picked the one picture that was post processed… that one was my HDR experiment for the batch.

  3. Pingback: Balanced Rock - The Norconk

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