Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Moab is perfect in April



I went to Moab this past weekend with Rachelle and Nathan (my sis and bro-in-law). We had a fabulous time - it was a perfect weather, not too hot, just a little breeze. It was actually a little cold on Friday.

We went to Arches one day. We hiked to Delicate Arch - a pretty hard hike but so worth the effort. It is an awe inspiring sight. It took us about 3 hours, but really we sat up there by the arch for almost an hour.

My favorite arch that we just discovered is Sand Dune Arch. It is a little, non-descript .2 mile hike, but such a hidden treasure. The hike is in between two giant walls of red rock, and as you go up the canyon, the ground turns to sand, until by the time you get to the arch, you are standing in a giant red sand sandbox of beautiful fine grain red sand. We spent another hour just sitting there, playing in the sand with our bare feet. It was the perfect thing to do after hiking to Delicate Arch - the cool sand felt really good on our tired and sore feet.
Our other activity of the weekend was Letterboxing. I think I've written about it before. I finally got my stamps carved about a week before this trip. I found a letterbox in West Jordan - my very first letterbox. I love it! Moab is saturated with letterboxes. We could have spent the entire time we were there looking for letterboxes. I tried not to be that annoying about it. We ended up finding 10 letterboxes. We searched for 2 others but didn't find them. So, we did spend a good deal of time on this, but the searches took us to some beautiful places. We found Moonflower Canyon up Kane Creek Rd because we were searching for a letterbox.
I think I even got Rachelle and Nathan a little bit intrigued by the activity. They were good sports and went along with my crazy ideas - I wasn't sure if they would like letterboxing or not.
Now I am wanting to go searching for them everywhere I go. There are some in Idaho Falls and Jackson that I want to look for. There are also quite a few in the Salt Lake area, so that will keep me busy for awhile.
This is a self portrait of the two of us at Double Arch. (Not sure that's the right name...)

I love exploring this world of ours. The southern Utah area is one of my favorite places to go. The red rocks are beautiful. We were discussing how it is a different kind of beautiful from the Wasatch Mountains, or the Tetons. But, I love both of them.

I am going to check on my 33 Things list soon. I think I have a few things I can already check off. Yea!

4 comments:

JulieJ said...

Yeah! That looks like so much fun.

Emily said...

Doug and I went to Moab in March 2 years ago, and it was my most favorite vacation ever! I loved the sand dune arch, too, but it was really windy that day so the sand was blowing everywhere. My favorite part of Arches was the windows and turret arch. I wish we had time to hike up to Delicate Arch, but we had a full schedule. I'm glad you had such an awesome trip!

All-stater said...

We did a quick stop in Arches too, we did a little 1 miler hike, we had a good view of it, but I wish we could've went on the longer one!

Erin said...

Ooh...I love Southern Utah! It sounds like you guys had a ton of fun hiking and exploring. That is truly my #1 favorite thing to do in the summer--camp, hike, and explore! This was fun to read about:)