A few of my favorite photos that we took at Arches National Park! Plus a video at the end. One of the (many) things that we really like about our visits to all of these national parks is getting to decide what places we want to come back to and spend more time at later. Neither of us could think of a single park that has disappointed us, there’s been something to appreciate about all of the ones we’ve seen, and several we’ll definitely return to someday!
Arches is an incredible park, we only barely scratched the surface. This was a long travel day for us, not in terms of time spent driving, but the amount of things we tried to fit in the day and that ended up happening (unplanned) too. We didn’t take on any big hikes within the park because we were so tired already, choosing instead to see what we could from the road or on a few short walks. We still got to see a lot and left pretty happy, but I’d definitely come back to see more someday!
Arches is another park that has a timed entry system, our reservation was for 4-5p, which I had contemplated rescheduling to get in earlier, but it worked out perfectly for us! After a 20ish minute wait at the gate, we had no issues with parking or crowds within the park. There are over 2000 arches here and each one we saw was more impressive than the last! A ranger gave us a great recommendation on where to watch the sunset and there were only a few people nearby us, bravo ranger!
Day 1 - Great Sand Dunes National Park
Day 2 - We drove back to Colorado Springs to pick up a couple of orders we otherwise wouldn’t be able to get for a few weeks, driving more than 8 hours and ending up at Mesa Verde (we were gone for 12 hours total that day)
Day 3 - We did a little exploring on our own and then a 4 hour tour of Mesa Verde
Day 4 - After a horrible night of sleep we hit the road by 6a, stopped at a national park site, then headed for Utah where we got a speeding ticket, sat on a random street in Moab so Beau could work for several hours, checked in at our campsite, and then went and explored Arches
Day 5 - Caryn ran a training at work all day then did 2 weeks of laundry
Day 6 - We had to move sites and had a 4 hour window between checking out of the first place and checking in at the second place, during that window we went grocery shopping and then sat in the parking lot of the store so Beau could work (thankfully no one seemed to mind)
Day 7 - Canyonlands National Park
Day 8 - Beau worked and then we stopped at Capitol Reef National Park on our way to a state park campsite
Day 9 - Bryce Canyon National Park
Day 10 - Zion National Park
Around Day 5 we decided that we would probably skip the rest of Utah and head straight for Santa Fe next with the hopes of maybe just being in one spot for a couple of weeks to recover before the next adventure, so we scheduled regular maintenance for our RV with a Mercedes dealership in Albuquerque (Santa Fe dealership couldn’t get us in until November), and then realized…we were going to be there during the big balloon festival, which would be cool to see, but this close to time is challenging to plan and increasing the costs, so we’re back to the drawing board.
Not complaining, I love every minute of this exhaustion, but also to be real, traveling all the time is sometimes very tiring 😴
As the sun was rising we made one last stop before leaving Colorado to the Yucca House National Monument, an unexcavated pueblo in Cortez. After driving down some dirt roads through farms we arrived…in someone’s driveway 🤷🏻♀️ We had to dodge their sprinkler to access the monument, made friends with a barn cat 🐈⬛ and got to see some tunas - the fruits of the prickly pear cactus!
A few more photos and videos from our time at Mesa Verde National Park.
There were 5 fires in the park between 1996-2003, all from lightning, they expect it will take 300 years for the trees to regrow.
There were more than a dozen deer very near our campsite on the last night there!
We loved getting to hike down to Cliff Palace, despite my fear of heights I managed the steep steps and ladders required to get in and out of the cliff dwelling, and marveled at how the Ancestral Puebloans managed scarier climbs, daily.
Fun fact: Mesa Verde isn’t a mesa, it’s a cuesta, because it’s not flat, it slopes. 🎵 The more you know! 🎶
We decided to take a tour of Mesa Verde and of course ended up being the youngest people by at least 25 years. Another couple that wasn’t on the tour asked how we managed to sneak onto the retirement tour 😂 We appreciated getting to learn more about the Ancestral Puebloans, imagining their lives here high in the rock cliffs.
We arrived at Mesa Verde National Park in the dark and left in the dark too, but also drove the main entrance road during the day. It’s a beautiful park, much bigger and more scenic than I’d anticipated when we first made plans to go there. It felt like the perfect way to wrap up our time in Colorado!
