Happy Birthday to me

The view from our bedroom window. 

Today we went to Arches National Park. Our first hike was out to Delicate Arch which is an easy 3.3 mile round trip over rocky trails, gentle slick rock and finally a ledge which takes you up to Delicate Arch. It's beautiful and very worth the hike.

Delicate Arch

On the return trip we took a little side trip over to view the petroglyphs, I'd left my camera back at the B&B so I couldn't get a great shot but I did the best I could with the iPhone. 

Petroglyphs on a side path on the way to Delicate Arch

Next we thought we'd drive up to Devil's Garden and hike out for a bit then have our sandwiches. We had lunch on a branch in front of Pine Tree Arch. 

Pine tree Arch

After lunch we thought we'd do the Primitive Trail (difficult hiking) a side trail off of the Devils Garden main trail that connects back into the main trail, the entire loop is 7.2 miles. Anna had told us about it at breakfast. It was really nice and there were very few people on it. We discovered later why that was. The path itself was deep desert sand so the going was pretty slow. Not a big deal. About halfway through the trail we came to a pool of water covering the entire trail with semi vertical slickrock on either side. There were a few spots where it looked possible to traverse the rock to avoid the water and a few people including Chris did that. I tried but was just too short to reach the footholds. I finally decided to take off my shoes and socks and wade across. That was fine and felt really good on my feet, the only problem was finding a place where I could pull myself up the slickrock and get out of the water. I finally found a small crevice I could get my foot into and pulled myself out of the water. After that I thought the hardest part was over; nope. 

The trail is on the top of the wall

Leopard Lizard posing for me

The trail was marked with cairns and a little bit up the trail the cairns went up the side of a slickrock wall. There was no way I could get my foot up to where I needed to and be able to pull myself up onto the wall. Chris had to lock his fingers so I could use his hands to boost me up since there was a crevice between the two portions of the trail. Made it, how much worse could it get? The next obstacle was a slickrock so steep I had to scoot myself up on my butt using my feet to grip the wall and push until I could maneuver myself over to a slight indentation in the rock. The trail then got a bit easier for a little while until we realized the next cairn was on top of a very tall slickrock and the trail actually went along the spine. The spines are about 4–6 feet wide with a rather long drop into rocks on either side. At that point we met a couple who seemed to know the way so we fell in with them. We scrambled up the rock and walked along the spine until the trail went down the other side and back onto dirt. We climbed over boulders and over more slickrock until we came to another very tall rock wall we had to scramble up to walk along the spine for about 200 feet until the trail dropped off on the other side and became dirt again. We continued on scrambling over and down rocks and onto and off of more slickrock until we were finally on the trail back to the parking lot. 

I think we were both exhausted at that point. 

Since it's my birthday we had dinner reservations at a nice restaurant here in Moab called Desert Bistro. What a wonderful way to end a very challenging but fun day. Wonderful food and service.