Here comes the sun, and I say
it’s alright
-The Beatles
I forgot to set an alarm last night, so it was a relief when Molly’s went off at 6 this morning. We were all a bit tired from last night still so it took us until 6:30 to actually get up and moving. We made a major change to our road trip plans this year. For as long as we’ve been coming to Moab we’ve stayed at the Inca Inn. It was much cheaper than any of the chain hotels here, had legit bread, and was nice enough. Over the past couple years the number of hotels in Moab has exploded. One of the newest, the Hyatt Place, seemed like it would be worth trying something new when I spotted a deal that was only $15/night more than the Inca.
One of the perks of the change in hotel was that we moved from having legit bread for breakfast to having an actual legit breakfast. We stumbled our way to the lobby pre-coffee and found eggs, bacon, potatoes, pulled pork, oatmeal, and much more. We fueled up and hit the road for our appointment with the Fiery Furnace.
Today was our fourth visit the this part of Arches that is infamous for being tricky to navigate. We were pretty successful in finding our favorite parts though. We only missed a part with a set of potholes that are fun to hopefully hunt for tadpoles in. We climbed rock formations that I’m sure we had never seen before. We got a bit lost a few times, but always quickly found our way back out. I took a nap under Surprise Arch in near complete silence. Every time we visit the Furnace there’s something new to discover and old favorites to revisit.
After climbing back to the parking lot we found a picnic table on the North end of the park and enjoyed our PBJ&C’s in surprisingly pleasant weather. Since we had a bit more time before Ellie needed to be back to the visitor center we drove to the Windows area of the park, a part we haven’t visited in many years. Again, there were both nastalgic parts and new discoveries to be made. I can’t see the Windows without flashing back to carrying Ellie up to them to have her declare “We made it” at the top. Apparently even riding on my shoulders was enough for her to feel she had accomplished something.
The new discoveries of the day were the Parade of Elephants Arches. We decided we didn’t have enough time to hike up to the windows, so instead we took the short trail to Double Arch. I could help noticing all of the other arches near Double Arch that had no signage to even give us their names. I pulled out the GPS which has many of them marked and began reading names. As I got to the Parade of Elephants Molly declared that of course that’s what they’d be called as they looked exactly like elephants. Of course, we wouldn’t have known that without knowing the names first, but they definitively do.
After dropping Ellie off at the ranger station (read her blog for more on that) Zoe, Molly, and I headed to the Courthouse Wash rock art panel, a part of the park we hadn’t ever seen before. Once we found the parking lot it was easy to find the trail, and a short hike brought us to the base of what was once an astounding panel of petroglyphs and pictographs. Unfortunately, some asshole decided to destroy much of the panel in 1980. What remains is still awesome though.
The Ancestral Puebloan drawings are in the same style that we saw in Horseshoe Canyon several years ago. They are much more intricately drawn, though, and colored in paint that remains bright after a thousand years. These drawings are interspersed with much more recent Ute carvings that are on the order of 200-400 years old. I’m glad we had the chance to see this panel today, since I don’t think we’ll see any more until the end of July.
After picking Ellie up we came back to the hotel for a swim, a cocktail, and some blogging. Tonight we’re meeting up with Ranger Mike for dinner, so we’ll have to update about that tomorrow.
