Most people don’t hear too much in the news about Utah. Aside from Mormons and the Utah Jazz, what else is in Utah? I would say it’s nature. Northern Utah has some great mountains and ski resorts. Southern Utah is very different. It’s full of canyons, mesas, arches, spires, buttes, and other crazy geological formations.
A business trip brought me to Salt Lake City on a Friday in July. The meeting was set up with little notice; we only had a week to make plans. Luckily, I didn’t have anything huge going on the following weekend, so I decided to make a mini-vacation out of it. You know it’s going
Arches National Park is a beautiful place, with a unique geology that features crazy rock formations everywhere. You can see over 2000 monoliths, rock fins, spires, balanced rocks, and natural arches in the park. Here’s a cool interactive map of the park, from the official park website. I made two trips to the park: one
It was late Saturday afternoon in Moab. I had just woken up from a peaceful air-conditioned siesta in the hotel, while the sun was bearing down outside with 105F temperatures. Hopefully it had cooled down a tiny bit. Time to head out again and do an evening hike. The original plan was to go back
Aside from Arches, Canyonlands National Park was the other major attraction to see on my Moab trip. Canyonlands is a very different land than Arches. In Arches, you look up or climb up to see most of the landmarks. The rock formations sticking up from the ground are is due to periods of geological turmoil
Arches National Park was so cool that I came back to see more the next day (Sunday). This time, the visit started in the early evening. My goal was to capture the warm evening sunlight against some of the rock formations I (intentionally) skipped the last time. In case you missed it, here’s a link