See the Day 1 post, where I drove scenic state route 128 to Fisher’s Towers for a quick hike, got into Moab, and saw Delicate Arch’s famous sunset.

Day 2: Saturday, March 27 – Arches and Dead Horse Point Sunset

I decided to make Saturday an Arches day, and read that Windows is a good sunrise spot. I woke up at 5:30 to head out, and caught some deer in the headlights right at the campsite parking lot. It was about thirty minutes again to get to the viewpoint. I headed over to North Window to watch the sun start to come up. It was very beautiful.

A bit crowded, though, so I found a spot by South Window to make oatmeal and coffee on my backpacking stove. It was less busy and very relaxing.

When the sun was up and my coffee was done, I took some pictures of Turret Arch before walking across the parking lot to Double Arch. 

Double Arch just has a short trail, along which there was a wedding photo shoot. You can climb up under the double arch pretty far. Looking up is definitely key here!

A kind stranger practically did a photo shoot when I asked him to take a photo of me. This picture really shows you the scale of this place!

I decided to drive to the Devil’s Garden trailhead, where there are several options for hiking. I headed to the famous Landscape Arch first, which is only 1.5 miles out. The arch is very thin, and actually had rocks crumble off fairly recently in a 1991 (hikers thought the rock cracking was thunder!).

I was going to carry on the primitive trail past Landscape, but there is some rock scrambling I did not really feel up to (even though I saw plenty of people do it), so I circle back to another entrance to primitive trail and decided to just do part of it, since the whole trail is 7.8 miles, which is a lot.

It finally started to warm up and I got great views of the La Sals shining in the sun and lots of weird rock formations. I ended up going around four miles round trip.

It was now around 10:30 am and the parking lot was full. I stopped at Sand Dune arch which was a small arch inside a rock formation full of sand. By now, I was getting tired and hungry and the park seemed a lot busier, so I headed back from Moab.

The park entrance was actually closed because the park was full as I left. Going early and leaving early was the way to go. I decided to go to the Moab food truck park. This is an awesome area with picnic tables and an assortment of food trucks (once again, great easy solo traveler meals!). I had an excellent quesadilla.

Next I decided to walk around town. Moab is fairly small but was very busy with lots of little ships and restaurants. They have an awesome bookstore. I also stopped for ice cream before heading back to my campsite to take a break, relax, and read.

For sunset, I headed to Dead Horse Point State Park. This is a state park but it is right next to Canyonlands National Park. It’s about a 45-minute drive from Moab, and you pass lots of off-roaders and mountain bikers.

Dead Horse Point is a stunning viewpoint for either sunset or sunrise (spoiler alert: I went here for sunrise too) because there’s an east rim and west rim.

I found a nice west-facing rock overlooking the canyon and the river and settled in with my beer to watch the sunset. It was fairly busy with several photo shoots going on, but there’s a ton of space to find your own little area to watch the sun go down.

I drove back in the dark and snuggled up for another chilly night camping so I could wake up for yet another sunrise. See my Day 3 post for that next sunrise.