Monday, January 22, 2018

Arches National Park: Sand Dune Arch and Broken Arch

After Delicate Arch, we headed north on the main road to see the sights and take in a couple more arches.

Our first stop was at the Fiery Furnace viewpoint.  We're going to go down and hike in there in a few days:


Looking south from the viewpoint:


Driving further up the road, we start coming to the fin formations in the sandstone:


We stopped around 10 times to take photos, but I'll restrain myself and just give you a taste:


We parked and started hiking towards Sand Dune Arch.  It's located in the fins, but we don't know that yet:



Here the trail turns into the fins:




Before very far you come into an open area, and there's the arch:


It looks so peaceful in here, and it is, except that while we were there there was a group of 3 families taking a break and hanging out, with around 10 kids under 10 screaming and chasing and shooting everywhere like electrons, and one of the Dads was (illegally) walking on top of the arch.  I had to just stay still and wait for all the kids to briefly fire themselves out of my viewfinder and then snap:


We turned back out of the fins and headed down the trail towards Broken Arch.  More fins and towers along the way:



Here we are.  It's not actually broken, but calling it that might help to keep the crowds away, we didn't see any other hikers on this part of the trail.


Broken Arch from the back, with Ed focusing on something else interesting off to the left:


There was another arch further down the trail, but we turned around here.  It was getting late in the day, plus it was a little hard to tell if the trail was fully open or not, as part of it was closed due to the road repairs they had been working on.

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