A Weekend in Moab

Delicate Arch at sunset

As is tradition, we left town for the three-day weekend to explore more of Utah's wonders! This year, we spent a few days down in Moab.

We left Saturday morning to start the fun weekend. We were initially hoping to go up Friday, but we needed a major school catch up day to compensate for playing the whole upcoming weekend. But it was nice to sleep in a bit on Saturday (meaning 7:00 a.m. we feel like such adults) before heading south.

We visited Dead Horse Point State Park first before we drove went into Moab. This place had some stellar views! We were originally going to do some mountain biking up at the park, but it was far more snowy and muddy than we anticipated. Instead, we just walked around the edge of the park overlooking the Colorado River and Canyonlands National Park. We particularly enjoyed the temperatures above thirty degrees--it was in the fifties!

While at the Dead Horse State Park visitors center, we asked about some other mountain biking trails closer to Moab where it would be more dry. And we were successful! We found some trails just north of Moab. The beginning of the trail was so muddy that we even got stuck a few times. But it was a lot of fun once we reached the slickrock! We road along the trail for as long as we could before the sun started setting. We are seriously so bummed we didn't take any cameras with us on the ride. The trail was fun and the sunset as we road back to the car was gorgeous.

From there, we got cleaned up and headed out to dinner for our Valentine's Date :) We went to a BBQ place in town called The Blu Pig. Their pulled pork sandwiches were delicious! Again, no pictures... Opps.

As usual, we had picked a fun little home from airbnb for our stay. It was a bed and breakfast for a stellar deal. The home had a few bedrooms with other couples staying for the weekend that were fun to chat with over breakfast. For our first breakfast there on Valentine's morning, we were served amazing strawberries and cream crepes and a sausage omelette, made complete with orange juice. Our hosts were seriously awesome.

After a good church meeting, we did a little more hiking. We originally planned on just taking some nice walks around the parks, but the hike guides we read were a little misleading, so we ended up exercising a little more than we had wanted to for Sunday, haha.

First we hiked up to Corona Arch. There wasn't a solid path to get up there, we just had to follow the cairn (little rock towers) to get to our destination. This was our first experience seeing a real rock arch! It was really neat. We even tried going off to the side to try to climb and be on top of the arch. But it was definitely a little too sketchy for us and we bailed half way through. Going back down was even worse than going up!

After that, we quickly zipped over to Arches to hike up to the famous Delicate Arch for sunset. To make it to the top in time, we ended up jogging a large part of the hike before reaching parts of the trail that were still covered in snow and ice. But it was so worth it! The view was stellar.

We enjoy jumping inside of arches.

We stayed at the top until the sun had set and it was dark. We filmed most of the sunset on our GoPro, which was really neat. A 30 second video of it is below. Hiking back with cruddy little flashlights that did little for our vision was interesting. The view of the stars out there was incredible though!

Monday was our last day in Moab :( we had originally planned to get up to see sunrise in Arches, but we decided sleep was more important, haha. So we woke up for a second delicious breakfast of sweet potato hash browns and quiche and leisurely left to hike around Moab again.

We were exploring the Fiery Furnace in Arches! We had to buy a special permit and get trained to hike around the Fiery Furnace. It was actually a bit less intense than we were expecting, but we really enjoyed not having to stick to a trail and just go bouldering. Around noon, we decided we wanted to set up our hammock to eat lunch and take a little break. It took us a little while to find out way back out, but it was a lot of fun doing some exploring.

After the Fiery Furnace, it was time to head back to Provo and celebrate Dustan's 25th birthday! It was a great weekend, as usual :)