Where is Arches National Park?
Here is the address you can put into your GPS (or phone):
PO Box 907
Moab, UT 84532
If you’re in Moab, tune your radio to 1610 AM for information about entering the Park.
How can you avoid the crowds?
Trust me; there can be a lot of people there. We were lucky as we always started our visit in the National Park early in the morning, so we didn’t have any problems to park, but this is a bit of great advice especially if you are sleeping later in the morning)
- Avoid visiting on the holidays/weekends ( the weeks surrounding Easter, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Utah Education Association break)
- To beat the crowds, try entering the Park early in the morning or late in the afternoon. Temperatures are more bearable, and the light is better for photography.
- Parking lots at popular trailheads and viewpoints such as Devils Garden, Delicate Arch, and The Windows are usually full for much of the day.
A map about Arches National Park:
I always stopped at the entrance where the closest Visitor Center is nearby, so you should do the same:
https://www.nps.gov/carto/hfc/carto/media/ARCHmap1.pdf
History from the People who lived here a long time ago:
Hunter-gatherers migrated into the area about 10,000 years ago at the end of an Ice Age. As they explored Courthouse Wash and the Salt Valley area, they found pockets of chert and chalcedony: two forms of microcrystalline quartz perfect for making stone tools. Chipping or knapping these rocks into dart points, knives, and scrapers created debris piles that are still visible to the trained eye.
Then, roughly two thousand years ago, the nomadic hunters and gatherers began cultivating individual plants and settled the Four Corners region. These early agriculturalists, known as Ancestral Puebloans, raised domesticated maize, beans, and squash, and lived in villages like those preserved at Mesa Verde National Park.
Few dwellings have been found in Arches, which was the northern edge of the ancestral Puebloan territory, so it’s possible they only visited seasonally – or that their dwellings have been lost to time. What does remain, though, are their drawings. Rock art panels are an invitation to wonder: Who made this? What were they thinking? Like earlier people, the ancestral Puebloans also left lithic scatters, often near waterholes, where someone may have shaped tools while watching for game.
The Fremont were contemporaries of the ancestral Puebloans who lived just to the northwest. Distinctions between the two cultures are blurry, though specific characteristics of Fremont rock art, pottery, and other artifacts clearly demonstrate the existence of different technologies and traditions.
For a variety of reasons, people began leaving the region about 700 years ago. Descendents of the ancestral Puebloans include people living in modern-day pueblos like Acoma, Cochiti, Santa Clara, Taos, and the Hopi Mesas.
As the ancestral Puebloan people were leaving, nomadic Shoshonean peoples such as the Ute and Paiute entered the area and were here to meet the first Europeans. The petroglyph panel near Wolfe Ranch is believed to have some Ute images since it shows people on horseback, and horses were adopted by the Utes only after the Spanish introduced them.
Rock art is often found at crossroads and near waterways. One such site can be seen a few miles north of Moab, where Courthouse Wash joins the Colorado River. This large and colorful panel displays evidence of people’s passage for hundreds of years.
What did we see in the Park?
We decided to do a little hike (but it would end by 6 hours hiking). We did Devil’s Garden Trailhead (with the longest arch in the world: 89 meters long at 32 meters high, then we saw the Double Arch, Dark Angel (actually we were the only one going there, but we meet a French woman who asks us for a picture to have a proof that she was there), Navajo Arch, Partition Arch. We feel what this is to not having enough water (even with 5 liters in the backpack).
Then we used the car to see Park Avenue, the Windows Section, Delicate Arch (from far away because we were so exhausted from our hike in the morning), Fiery Furnace.
Enjoy your visit to Arches National Park!
