Andrew and I camped at Horse Thief Campground which is on the road out to Canyon Lands and Dead Horse Point, turn off about a mile before Arches. I would recommend this campground of you're going to the area. It's $12 a night or half if you are a national park card holder, there are nice juniper trees that provide a nice environment, and plenty of camp sites. Be sure to bring water though, they do have pit toilets but no drinking water.
Saturday morning we got up b
right and early to go on a 5+ hr hike consisting of 2 canyons called Big Horn and Dragonfly.The pull off is about 4 miles into Arches right after the Big Horn Wash. We started off on the hike and our printed off instructions told us to look for a big wash to our right after about a mile of hiking. I found a big wash to the right after about a 15 minute hike and figured this had to be our turn off. For some reason Andrew didn't believe that I was correct and insisted we kept hiking, and hiking...and hiking.....and hiking till 2 hours later he finally decided we missed the turn off and aloud us to turn back around. The hike turned out to be 4 hours of bush whacking through the most terrible kind of bushes and being eaten alive by flies! The whole hike wasn't terrible because we both love to hike so any hiking is
great. I did feel quite satisfied though when Andrew admitted that I had been correct on the location of our turn off.
Since it was about 12:00 by the time we arrived back to the car we were pretty hungry and tired so I took Andrew to one of my favorite hikes in the park. Double Arch! We hiked out to it, just a very short hike, and ate our sandwiches under the arches.
Trying to get myself and the arch in the picture :)
I love to people watch so while eating I observed a family next to us trying to figure out their "story". After 10 minutes they packed up and left and a few minutes after that I found that they had left their camera. I checked their pictures to be sure and ran off to get it to them before they got to the car. I running .6 miles in 94 degree heat as fast as i could in my sanuks and all i got was a "oh thanks...". I told Andrew we should have kept the camera and used it to take pictures of the rest of our vacation since ours had run out of battery and we were using our itouch to take pictures.
Since it was burning hot we felt unmotivated to hike anything else till it got a little cooler. We went into town and snuck into a hotels swimming pool. They don't heat the swimming pool and it was freezing but sooo refreshing! I did get a bloody nose after jumping in the water though so I didn't spend much time swimming.
After some ice cream and a little food we went to the park to rest.
Can't really tell in the picture but my legs are half scratched to death from the bush whacking.
We decided it would be fun to watch the sunset while at Delicate Arch so we headed back into Arches. We were there 2 hrs before the sunset so we took the hike slow which was really nice.
Tried to take pictures for ourselves.
Then we got a little help :)
Eating Fruit by the Foot while waiting for the sun to set.
Saturday night we had hot dogs and smores by the fire before I passed out for the night.
Since neither of us have been to Dead Horse Point (or that we can remember) we went their first thing in the morning.
Andrew being Andrew.
It was worth it to see all the layers of sandstone, which Andrew can list for you if you would like, and to see the maze of canyons!
Since we didn't want to leave defeated from our previous try of our hike Saturday we decided to do it before we left Sunday. We only did the Dragonfly portion, promising to come back and do Big Horn another time.
The only shoes I brought were keens and sanuks and after our long hike the previous day my feet were hurting so yes, I wore socks with my sandals.
To save ourselves from walking another 1.5 miles we thumbed a ride from the end of the hike to the start. It took a good 15 cars to pass us before finally a couple of frechies who could barely speak english picked us up.
I don't have many pictures of the actual hike because we wanted to use up a disposable waterproof camera we got on our honeymoon and the pictures are not scanned onto our computer yet.
The series of potholes we were about to go through.
The hike was not very slotty but was still a lot of fun. We swam through 5 potholes and did 2 rappels, one being 130 feet long.
My wet butt marks from scooting along the sandstone wall.
Andrew going down the 130 ft rap.
The description of the hike said "there is a small amount of poison ivy at the bottom of the rappel but can easily be avoided". It was not a small amount but was still somewhat avoidable. We thought we had escaped until 2 days later when both of our arms were pussy and itching.
Beaver Dam in the middle of the canyon.
After a successful hike we went to Sand Dune Arch and then headed back to SLC.
sounds like quite the adventure!!
ReplyDeleteWHAT were your arms?? Gross! haha Sounds like you had a good time. Looks hot.
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