Devil's Garden

7/5/2018

As promised, we woke at 5:30, ate a quick snack of bars and trail mix before heading to the trailhead. We walked to the Devil’s Garden Trailhead, which was about a mile from our campsite, and a 8+ miles loop of unbelievable landscapes. Devil’s Garden has the largest arch in the world, measuring 306 feet, and has over 2,000 arches in the park (the minimum size of an arch is 3 feet).

Sunrise at our campsite

The place was insane. Everywhere we looked was either amazing arches, or amazing fins. We learned how this land was formed, but I forget. It’s something like a plate slide under this plate, and made the land curve, and split. Then over lots of time, they eroded to look like this.

It was a pretty long hike, and we didn’t get back to camp until it was too hot and around noonish. We found some shade and cooked up some breakfast sandwiches with egg, bacon, hot sauce, cheese, arugula, tomato, and other yummy things. We cleaned up breakfast and decided we needed to find water. This turned out to be a big challenge for us.

First, it takes about 40 minutes to get out of the park. Once we got out, we had a few BLM campsites that were on the river, but none of them really had good water access with a place to hangout at. We tried a few of the campgrounds, then decided on taking the pedestrian bridge across the river. We’re all overheating (or at least I was), so as soon as we got across the bridge, my unclear mind saw a path to the river and lead everyone down 15 foot sheer rocky decline through a bunch of bushes. I actually said “I’m not turning back, I don’t care, I’m getting in the water”. I remember saying all of this, and it seemed to make sense at the time, but looking back it was a bit nutty.

We go to the water and I was the first one to walk through muck and submerge myself. About 15 seconds into my swim, I realized my phone was still in my pocket. Hopeful, I took it out and handed it to Tim after turning it off. After about 15-20 minutes we felt back to normal, and realized there was a less mucky and easier way to get in the water, so we went down there and swam for a bit before heading into town.

The rest of the day was spent popping in and out of air conditioned stores looking at art, chochkies, and other fun things. Most fun of all was the ice cream and beer we had at the Garage (highly recommend it). We had dinner in town and drove back to the campsite in time for it to be shady, and the sun to start setting.

For a second night in a row, we headed up to the highest spot we could safely get to, and watched the sunset on the rocks. It was magical. We waited as long as we could before it got too dark, and we headed back to camp to enjoy the stars and cool down before bed.

More sunrise

It's crazy that things grow here

The crew at sunset