This spectacular post is brought to you courtesy of the Devil’s Garden trail in Arches National Park. For anyone not familiar, this particular area contains the “most difficult/strenuous” trails in the park accessible without a permit.

Today, this awesomeness happened!

Naturally, we headed right in despite the warnings posted that the trails contained steep drop-offs, narrow cliff walks, slippery surfaces, and vague trail markers. People afraid of heights are advised not to go.

Ominous trail sign! See those “fins” in the distance? We hiked over and on top of some!

Indeed, parts of the trail were pretty sketchy. At some points, we were hiking up the narrow ridges (called fins) with steep drop-offs on either side. Sometimes, I needed to use my hands and feet to stabilize myself on the way up or down the steep sandstone surfaces. Our friends, the cairns, seemed to be playing hide-and-seek at times, but we only had to backtrack once or twice to find the trail. Interestingly, our hike through the Devil’s Garden came to exactly 6.66 miles on Billy’s hike tracker. Spooky.

On top of one of the fins. The drop-off on the right was probably about 100 feet, a little less on the left.

Last scary fin on the way home. Billy is there for scale. I caught him on the way back from his stroll to the end.

Me standing in Double O Arch.

We had access to several interesting arches along the way. The park does a great job of making sure most of the arches are easily accessible to the road. The arches in this area are less-observed since they are several “difficult” miles in. We made it out alive and without injuries. Overall, it was a pretty unique hike that wasn’t quite as difficult as the signage indicates.

We ended the day at Deadhorse Point State Park to catch the sunset over the canyon. The evening was hazy and the sunset was not shaping up to be anything spectacular. Billy and I intended to take some drop-dead gorgeous photos of the intricate canyon with a colorful sunset backdrop. But we were both pretty tired and uninspired by the conditions overall, so we took a few snapshots and headed to our hotel. Speaking of hotels…our current room feels like a cross between a prison cell, a dorm room, and a dog shelter. We’ve found several pieces of dry dog food laying around and Bill began sneezing literally 20 seconds after entering the room. Gotta keep the costs down! Once again the internet is beyond abysmal so full-size photos will have to wait.

View of the canyons at Dead Horse Point. You can see the 4-wheel driving road in the photo. It looks white.

Tomorrow we will likely head to Capital Reef. We are looking for suggestions/ideas for must-see areas, so weigh in if you have any favorite hikes! Ciao for now!