Arches...if you haven't been here, you MUST!!

Wow, we went to some amazing places.  And we were incredibly blessed to visit Arches on this particular day.  The average temp for Arches in July is 100 degrees.  It was 70 degrees on our day.  And, the average rainfall is like 0.1".  It rained (or sprinkled) for half the morning we were there.  It was nice except for the face that I had a huge camera down my shirt.  Hey, it's the important things.

I guess the morning didn't start off too well for this one...  And, yeah, see that scrape all the way across her face?  She fell out of the camper.  Off the bed end.  5 feet above the ground.  Onto her face.

And, as you can see, it's raining enough to actually run down the rocks.

Someone was actually traveling with their parrot!!  They had this whole set up in their FJ Cruiser with pvc pipe.

This was our first actual stop.

 
So, see where those people are?  It was super steep.

That's where Chuck is.


I thought this was far enough.  It was slippery...and steep!!!

I think Chuck took this (I honestly can't remember if I climbed all the way up or not now).  Super high and you could see forever, even with the rain.

Okay, just found this.  Guess I climbed to the top.

You can see all the rain in the top of this pic.

Gosh, can you believe the size of these arches?!

The next arch was fairly easy to hike up to.  

 

And this was the other side of that arch.

And the first arches from the arch we all climbed into.

This one had so much fun hiking!!!  He was cracking everyone up!  We were acting like a train to make sure we were single file (not as important here as it was at the Grand Canyon).

Then we made a small hike to this Delicate Arch, one of the most famous arches.  You can actually hike all way to this arch, but it was like 3-5 miles each way.  Chuck didn't want to do that with both kids.  The more famous pictures are ones from where the people are on the other side of this arch.  This park is open 24 hours a day and so photographers hike up to this at all hours and take amazing pictures.  Someday, maybe.

The day ended with more rain and an unsuccessful off road trip to an area we couldn't make it up.  We saw a sign that said high-clearance vehicles necessary and basically thought it was saying "please don't attempt to drive your Cadillac down this road" but really, it meant high clearance vehicle.  Chuck wasn't even sure his truck would have made it up where we were trying to go.

Anywho, that's all she wrote for today!!!