April 24 - Day 2 at Goblin Valley State Park and onto Arches!

Thursday morning we packed up and headed for a challenging hike within Goblin Valley State Park: Goblin's Lair. This hike took us around the main Goblin Valley area to a new set of sights like the Three sisters, the Seven Dwarves, and the Goblin Castle. Finally, we reached Goblin's Lair. This was a scramble about 40 feet up through sand, gravel, and boulders. This was our most technical challenge to date. Haley made it 98% to the top, Leon made it to the cave, but we were both very nervous about falling on the way up and the way down.

Feeling froggy at the beginning of the hike. We got an early start, so it was nice and cool with a light breeze. We had the entire trail to ourselves, only seeing one other person from a distance during the entire 2 hours.

Taken by Haley from the height reached on the climb up to Goblin's Lair. Very much a harrowing climb.

Leon making the scramble.

Leon took this from the entry to the cave, called the Goblin's Lair (aka The Lair of the Basilisk)

The entrance to the Goblin's Lair - he didn't go inside.

Descending from the climb

My intrepid explorer stance

View of the area we climbed to get to the Goblin's Lair

We left there with a feeling of accomplishment, got our showers, then hit the road back to Green River for charge, lunch, and groceries. We had lunch at a tasty taco truck while we charged. The grocery store was about 1/3 the size of a normal store, but they had what we needed. From there we headed to Arches National Park. After talking to the park volunteer, we decided to see most of the park today except for the challenging hike to Delicate Arch. We saved that for the following day, when we could get up early and do it before it got too warm. My first thought as we drove through and saw the park was that it was a LOT more than arches. While the few arches we saw were cool, the monuments and walls in the landscape were the real highlights to us. That said, Landscape Arch was amazingly long, and The Windows had a truly unique architecture. Devil's Garden also had cool fins to see, and we learned how these formed. We enjoyed the Windows area most of all; it was close to the highlight for me: Double Arch, featured in quite a few movies, including one of the Indiana Jones movies.

We hiked the 2 miles roundtrip to see Landscape Arch - it is impossibly thin! Its span is equal to a football field.

One of the Windows

Haley's favorite: Double Arch

View from directly under Double Arch - Leon climbed up. That's me beside the boulders in the distance.

Looking up into Double Arch

Driving through Arches, there were these large formations/walls all along the way.

This picture shows the many layers of sedimentary rock that lead to the uneven rate of erosion, creating the crazy formations.

We stayed longer than planned because there were too many cool sights to pass up. From there we made our way to Dead Horse Point State Park where we were meeting Avi and her friends for our three night stay there in yurts. We so appreciate Avi taking care of this for everyone! We got in a little after 7:00 after a brief stop getting our tickets to Arches for the next morning (they have timed entry tickets required for entering between 7 and 4 each day - we wanted tickets for 7am so we could get to our hike early before the heat of the day). We enjoyed a little time with friends and then turned in around dark. The night sky was beautiful, but we were too tired to enjoy it that evening. We had hiked somewhere around 7 miles of trails with a good amount of elevation gain on each one. We were pooped!