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continued…

After grabbing lunch at Subway, we hurried off towards Arches National Park, without stopping to replenish our water supply, which proves to be a problem later on. During our 4 hour drive, we entertained ourselves with puzzles and “what happened?” scenario games – basically someone proposes a scenario like “A naked man is found dead in the middle of a field holding onto a straw, what happened?” and the players can ask Yes or No questions to find out what happened. (This becomes important later on) The drive was quite scenic and we arrived at Arches National Park at around 5:45pm.

After visiting the visitor’s center and talking to the park ranger, we followed his recommendation and went to visit some easy spots first.
This is “Balanced Rock” – a ball of rock resting on a stone structure. Wonder how many years it’ll take before the ball collapses.

Side view of Balanced Rock – you can see how thin the supporting point is.

We then went to “The Windows”, which is a series of arches. This one even has a hole in the wall.

Double Arches at South Window:

The Big Arch at South Window:

Reminded me of the arch we saw at St. Louis during Urbana ’06.

At around 6:45pm, we arrived at the trail head towards Delicate Arch, which is a free-standing arch that got us on this entire trip in the first place. (One of the organizers saw the arch in a photo, started planning the trip but decided to drop Arches National Park altogether because it was slightly out of the way and arches didn’t seem THAT impressive… yet here we are in the end). It was another long hike with a lot of elevation gain :S, but what made this hike more fun was the 2nd half of the trail wasn’t paved and only had sparse trail markers.

The sun was low in the sky by the time we started, creating some pretty lights against the clouds in the sky.

Sunset was due to occur at 8:10pm that day, and the ranger estimated 1.5 hours to get up to the top, so we hurried up the trail, hoping to arrive in time to capture sunset at the Delicate Arch. We wandered through some beautiful landscape (and it felt all the more adventurous without a clearly defined trail) and got to the Delicate Arch at 7:45pm or so – just before sunset.

We wandered through some pot like rock formation:

and the 2nd half of the trail was not paved and is only marked by trail markers like these:

After some elevation gain we got to a very “wilderness” section of the trail – it definitely felt different from hiking on a paved trail.

And we found an oasis in the middle of the wilderness.

And finally, Delicate Arch – a free standing arch, quite different from the ones at South Window.
From a different angle, Delicate Arch is at the edge of a bowl shaped structure with a steep drop on both sides.

We found plenty of other photographers camping out around Delicate Arch for a good sunset shot when the sun would cast its golden rays on the Delicate Arch stone structure – but unfortunately the clouds were in the way and the direction of the sun’s rays weren’t right, so we never saw the fading sun over the Delicate Arch. We did, however, see a beautiful sunset in general.

The sunset light can be seen on the mountains in the backdrop, but missed the arch itself.

Sunset lighting the clouds up as if they are on fire.

We left Delicate Arch just before sundown so we can avoid hiking back down the mountain in darkness. We got back to the car at around 9:00pm and we still have a 4 hour drive to our next stop for the night at Page, AZ. We continued to pass time and combat sleepiness with our “What happened?” scenario games, involving a wide variety of strange scenes with people dying from falling, suffocating, amputation etc., when the scariest event of the day happened.

Since Garmin said our ETA was close to 2AM, we decided to grab a quick bite at Wendy’s and keep pressing towards our hotel for the night. We switched drivers at Wendy’s and that’s when the chain of events began to unfold. Our new driver was complaining throughout the day how there wasn’t enough wildlife throughout Utah, and he wanted to see like flocks of bison in the wild or something. Well, his wish was granted as he made a turn onto a rural road and he screamed “Oh my god, what the f***” and slammed on the brakes. After all the screaming in the car subsided, we saw 3 donkeys taking their sweet time crossing the road ahead of us. After our close call with the donkey, we were more alert for wild animals, until we started playing more “what happened” games where we were investigating how a human arm ended up in a mailbox, and suddenly the driver screamed and braked again as deers crossed right in front of us. After these two close calls, more eyes were on the road ahead of us… only to observe more strange things.

With murder by suffocation and amputation on our minds, we came across an old car abandoned at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, which we thought was rather strange and bizarre. We continued down “Main Street” (which really is a rural road with a speed limit of 65mph (110km/h or so)) and after following a gentle curve, our headlights shone on a man in a checkered hoddie with his thumb held up. We were quite shocked at the sight of a hitchhiker in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road as questions raced through our minds – what was he doing there at close to 1AM in the morning? Someone suggested it was a setup where if we stopped, the hitchhiker’s crew hiding in the fields would come out and jump us; someone even suggested he was a ghost hitchhiker :|. In any case, our car was full so we couldn’t have stopped, but we thought the most plausible scenario was the guy’s car broke down and he was walking towards the next town when we drove by. We decided to find the nearest mile marker and use our cell phones to call 911 in case the hitchhiker really needed assistance (or if it really was a crime setup). Unfortunately, our cell phones did not have reception since we are in the middle of nowhere – so we went on with our imaginations running wild as to ‘what happened?’.

We are approximately 20 minutes away from Page when we crossed the train tracks and again, braked abruptly to avoid hitting a wild dark horse crossing the road :|. None of the passengers saw what we were stopping for, but good thing our driver was alert and apparently saw the reflection of the horse’s eyes. Having quite enough wild animals for the day, we arrived at the Super 8 Motel and checked in around 2AM.

When we passed the state line from Utah to Arizona, I pointed out that there’s a possibility of timezone difference between UT and AZ. Strictly speaking, UT and AZ are on the same time zone (MST), but from my studies at ASU, I found out AZ does not observe daylight savings, but unfortunately I do not know if this is the time of the year where UT and AZ are in sync or out of sync. When we got to our hotel rooms, we found out that AZ is actually out of sync with UT right now and to our pleasant surprise, it is actually 1 hour behind, meaning it is only 1AM-ish and we get an extra hour of sleep :).

At this point we are completely out of water and Gatorade and I ended up drinking Arizona tap water from a small town 😐 and vowing to stop by Walmart first thing in the morning.

P. S. Day 3 may take a while because the best photos of the trip are from Day 3 – and I have double the amount of shots to process through 😛