Arches Scenic Drive

Forget about that super expensive ticket, we have finally reach our destination town for the weekend, Moab! We have our lunch break via Mandarin Szechuan Restaurant before heading over to evening plan here, the Arches National Park. It was just a quick drive from Moab town, but it was already around 2:30 PM when we reach the visitor center, without wasting much more time, we start out exploration around the park!

Passing the visitor center and climbing steeply along switchback road.

The road slowly elevate to higher ground, and we came over to the first major zone of the park which is Park Avenue and Courthouse Towers area. You will be surrounded by massive monoliths towering walls, and also an open view towards the nearby La Sal Mountains. There was Park Avenue trail that offer the close up view on these collection of tall stone columns in the zone, but due to limited time allocated here, we do not explore the trail here.

Car park area via Park Avenue.

Mountain range that attract my eyeballs away.

BH and towering walls at the Park Avenue trail-head.

Beautiful La Sal Mountains range faraway.

Love the view here very much!

The Organ.

Next we stop our car to have a quick view on one of the most iconic features of the park, the Balanced Rock. Standing high at 39 Meters, it appear to be an epic balancing act, but in fact it's actually not balanced at all. The slick rock boulder of Entrada Sandstone sits attached to its eroding pedestal of Dewey Bridge mudstone. The exposure of these two rock strata layers are ideal for the formation of arches and balanced rocks. The boulder is say to have the size of three school buses, and weight over 4 million KG!

Make a right turn after a while to The Window road, and here we go to explore the Window Section of the park.