monument valley & arches national park

Arches National Park visitor centre
South Window Arch

A rock just balancing on top!

Us at one of the lookouts

Delicate Arch

Me in front of Delicate Arch

Landscape Arch

Bronte in front of Landscape Arch

Tuesday 11th March

Today on the agenda was Arches National Park, just out of Moab, Utah. This national park is full of sand stone arches that have been created over 1000's of years from wind, rain and water. We looked around the visitor centre first and watched a short movie on how these arches are created. Once done at the visitor centre we hit the park armed with the map. All I can say OMG there are so many arches and so much to see. It took us all day to get around the park and do a few of the walks required to see some of the arches. One of the arches, Delicate arch was a 2.4 km walk one way. This arch is the "unofficial" emblem of Utah, they even have it on their number plates on their cars. Another one of note is called Landscape arch which has the largest span and is the thinnest on the top portion. It is only 6 feet thick at the smallest spot on the top and has a span of 306 feet. Back in 1991 a large portion of sand stone fell from the top of this while people were there. They have now blocked it off so you can't go underneath, it is going to eventually fall down. Once we were all arched out we hit the road again. This time we are heading for Denver, Colorado at the moment we are stopped at Grand Junction, Colorado as we have about 400ks to drive in the morning. Need to get some rest now as we have more to do and lots of places to go, we have travelled about 2500 miles so far. The PT Cruiser is not new any more!

Us in front of the Monuments

Tall and skinny

More Monuments

Monuments in the distance

Monday 10th March

Today we decided to get up early and head to Monument Valley which was 200ks away from Page, Arizona. We arrived at Monument Valley and paid our $10 to enter the national park. The entry included a 14 mile sandy track that you could drive around and do a lap of all the different monuments. If you think the scenery is familiar then maybe it's because like me, you like Back to the future 3 with Michael J Fox as some of the movie was filmed here. The filming of the Delorian driving through the desert when Marty went back to the wild west to rescue the Doc. If you remember the scene with the cowboys and Indians chasing the Delorian then that's where it was filmed. Once you are there in real life it is exactly how it looked in the movie. The monuments are amazing some of them are over 1000 feet tall. It is hard to believe some of them do not fall over. Any way we took a few hours to look around and then hit the road again and headed for Moab, Utah for the night. We managed to get really cheap accommodation and it was a nice place.