I headed to town the next morning. After my cool hike/climb the day before I was in the mood for more of the same. I really wanted to find a place to rock climb, but I've got a gimpy wrist that wouldn't hold up to any serious climbing. So I headed to the Arches National Park just north of town. Arches is a really small national park with tons of amazing natural sandstone formations. I picked the most extreme-sounding hike towards the Double-O arch and something called the Dark Angel at the northernmost point of the park.

The hike was pretty cool. At first I was dubious - it was right next to the campground and the parking lot was crowded, almost like at Yellowstone. After about a mile I came to Landscape Arch. That's when I realized that I'd forgotten my camera battery. Doh! So, once again, it's iphone pictures. Sorry folks.

The landscape was really neat. But, like I said, crowded.

Once I reached the primitive trail the traffic thinned out. The path alternated between fine sandy dirt and slick rock (sandstone rock formations), which was really cool. The north part of the park was a high point, and you could see really far in all directions.

After a few miles I made the Double-O arch. It's giant and really cool. You can see the second 'O' at the bottom of the picture.

There were very few people at this point, and I did a little off-roading. I climbed to the back of the arch and around the edge of the surrounding rock formations. There was a tall flat rock at the border and I climbed up. The wind was really heavy there but it felt good. I really like imagining places like this as 'undiscovered', like how a trapper or Native American might have seen them. Imagine being a member of a native tribe that lived here, and having this be the normal geography of your 'hometown' - feeling that the rest of the world was so flat and absent of sandstone and strange. It's difficult to do in a national park, but if you can get away from the crowds for a bit, try to. Sitting there with the wind whipping through my hair on top of the rough red rock overlooking the plateau below is the part of the day that I will remember best.

I took the trail to the Dark Angel rock. It doesn't really look like an angel anymore. Maybe 150 years ago when it was named. Now it looks distinctly like something else.

I did some more trailblazing behind the angel, climbing up some high rock hills and working my way around the edge of the park for quite awhile. I ended up getting stuck at the edge of a cliff and having to wedge myself inside a crevice and shimmy down. Like I said, I have health insurance now - thank mom!

After that I ran into Private Arch:

I completed the loop and left the park. I had planned to go to Delicate Arch, the spindly, thin arch that's probably the most famous in the park, but I was exhausted. It had been a lot of hiking and climbing. When I sat in my car it hit me. So I went back to town. It was supposed to rain so I found a hostel - the Lazy Lizard. It was $9 and much nicer than the Denver one.