Will never go back, but for me it was the drinks. You hike up to Delicate Arch in 100 degree heat, you come down dreaming of one cold soda, and the visitor area hands you a lukewarm bottle that has been sitting in the desert sun, no ice anywhere, served with pride. The hole in the rock survived erosion. My will to live did not survive a warm Gatorade.
Is Arches worth visiting once, let alone twice?
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Arches is honestly fine. It delivers exactly what it promises: there are arches. You definitely get what you seek, you and the thousands others. Oh you thought it was going to be a magical moment in between alien-arches? Think again.
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Will never go back, but for me it was the drinks. You hike up to Delicate Arch in 100 degree heat, you come down dreaming of one cold soda, and the visitor area hands you a lukewarm bottle that has been sitting in the desert sun, no ice anywhere, served w
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Arches is honestly fine. It delivers exactly what it promises: there are arches. You definitely get what you seek, you and the thousands others. Oh you thought it was going to be a magical moment in between alien-arches? Think again.
The problem is that the entire park feels like a geological scavenger hunt designed for people who don’t actually want to hike but rather take pics. You drive five minutes, park, walk 0.3 miles, look at a rock with a hole in it, take a family photo where at least one child is visibly miserable, then repeat the process for six hours.
Delicate Arch is cool. Landscape Arch is cool. Double Arch is cool. But eventually you realize you are spending your entire day evaluating increasingly minor variations of “rock but curved.” Just go hike nearby.
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Funniest part is Canyonlands is like 30 minutes up the road, basically empty, and the canyons just go on forever. Everyone funnels into the one park with the word Arches in the title because the name tells you exactly what you're buying. We collectively picked the park that's easiest to explain to coworkers.
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Everyone in here is arguing about rock holes and skipping the actual recommendation, which was 'just go hike nearby.' That's the whole post. You can spend six hours ranking curved sandstone, or you can walk twenty minutes off the paved loop and have the same desert mostly to yourself. People keep defending the loop they didn't have to be on.
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You think the park is the problem. The problem is the entrance booth. They have engineered a single gate that backs the line up onto Highway 191, so before you admire one curved rock you spend forty minutes admiring the rear bumper of a Tahoe with six bikes on it. They built a national park whose first scenic overlook is the brake light in front of you.
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Skip the arches, fair, but spare a thought for dinner in Moab. After six hours of ranking curved rocks I sat down to the local cuisine and was served a burger the colour of the surrounding landscape, beige meat, beige bun, one defiant pickle that had wandered in by mistake. We hiked all that way to eat the exact plate I could ruin at home in the rain.
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This is such a back-home take. You measured the whole park by how many holes you could rank in six hours. Where I live now nobody would dream of speedrunning a desert. You drive five minutes, you see Double Arch, and instead of sprinting to the next one you sit, you do nothing, you let the afternoon go unscheduled. The diminishing returns are not the arches. It is the spreadsheet brain you brought to them.
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The arches are fine. The parking lot at the Delicate Arch trailhead is the real American monument. A field of trucks the size of my apartment, each one circling for a spot like wildlife at a watering hole, while a man in a vehicle with its own zip code waits with his indicator on, factory sealed, never once used. I have parallel parked in three capitals. This defeated me.
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The piece undersells one detail: the heat. There is no shade in Moab. None. The sun does not set on Delicate Arch, it parks on it. I walked the 1.5 miles up that slickrock at what the forecast cheerfully called pleasant and arrived at the famous arch medium rare. The arch has stood there forty thousand years and even it looks like it wants to go inside.
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Honestly relieved someone said it. Drove all the way to Arches and the headline attraction is a rock with a hole in it. Walked 0.3 miles in the heat to confirm the hole was, in fact, still a hole. Two stars, the main exhibit had a gap in it and nobody had fixed it.
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I will fully admit I waited 25 minutes in the Delicate Arch line for the exact photo four million other people already have, and then I went home and framed it. So I'm clearly not the guy to defend my own taste in here. The bit is that I'd do it again.
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Will never go back, but for me it was the drinks. You hike up to Delicate Arch in 100 degree heat, you come down dreaming of one cold soda, and the visitor area hands you a lukewarm bottle that has been sitting in the desert sun, no ice anywhere, served with pride. The hole in the rock survived erosion. My will to live did not survive a warm Gatorade.
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