Day Fourtyeight
Day Fourtyeight

Manti-La Sal National Forest, UT to Arches National Park, UT
July 30th, 2004

High Point of the Day....
Low Point of the Day......
Brian & Theresa - Our Devil's Garden evening hike
Brian - 101 degrees in the shade
Theresa - Not one
Miles Traveled Today
Total Miles Traveled
Miles Theresa Drove
Weather
169
11321
0 (3207 total)
Sunny, in the high 90's and low 100's
Price of Gas 
(average per gallon)
Wildlife
Night's Lodging
Where this Page was Uploaded
1.98
Cows, lizards, and bats
Devil's Garden Campground
Sedona, AZ

Daily Didactic
The day began in the ridiculously nice, and remarkably empty, Devil's Canyon campground south of Monticello. Ken dropped back in to finish up the tune-up he started yesterday morning and, when he was done, we putted on up the road. An artist in a Cortez Gallery had tipped us off to a very nice wall of Petroglyphs called Newpaper Rock outside of Monticello and our camp host at Devil's Canyon tipped us off to a scenic backroad to get there. We drove up and over a small pass with nice vistas of Canyonlands National Park and dropped down into a narrow canyon to find Newspaper Rock. It was a truly impressive collection of pretroglyphs, so named by the early anglos in the area because they figured it looked like a collection of news and stories. We opted not to venture further up the canyon to the Needles, in Canyonlands, in hopes of getting up to Arches National Park in time to find a campground for the night.

We got to Arches around noonish and managed to get one of the last half dozen or so sites in Devil's Garden campground, at the end of the park road. We're not sure what it is with "Devil's" this and that in this country, but with the addition of Garden to Tower, Den and Canyon, we are starting to get a little concerned. We drove the eighteen miles to the end of the road to find a site, did a little bouldering around on the big lumpy red rock at the back of the campground, realized it was 100 degrees, and beat it back down to road to Moab for some air conditioning. After a very long lunch, a little poking around Moab, and a lengthy retreat in the Arches Visitors Center, we eventually gave up and returned to our site. Waiting for the heat to abate before our anticipated evening hike, we sat in the relative chill of 100 degrees in the shade and read for an hour or so. At around 7:00 we headed up the Devil's Garden Trail. It was an absolutely great trail that passed past six or seven arches, wound up and over lots of slickrock, waded through lots of powdery red sand, and ran down the top of the rock fins that much of this area is made up of. Waiting at late as we did, the temperature was down in the very pleasant 80's and we caught an awesome sunset at the trail's end before heading back under a huge moon in the company of a lot of bats. We had a quick bite to eat and called it a very cool (figuratively speaking) day.


Daily Pictures (Slide Show)

Morning in Devil's Canyon campground, site 6 Our sunken living room
Ken pops in for the second day in a row, for a tune up Tall wild sunflower
Last time we drove this road it was a little spooky, thumbs up on the reorientation Newspaper Rock, more or less on the way to Moab
The red rock road to Moab Crossing the Colorado River
The road into Arches National Park Theresa calls it Pharoah's Head
The bus, doing a little site seeing The Window Arches
Arches in training 100.5 in the shade
Just a pretty rock Rock fins on the Devil's Garden trail
Brian, looking goofy, feeling happy Another pretty rock
Landscape Arch Brian, pondering Landscape Arch
Theresa ''hiking the fin'' ''Dark Angel'' at sunset



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