Arches National Park

Arches National Park contains more than 2,000 natural sandstone arches within a compact area of desert canyon, making it one of the most concentrated arch formations on earth. The park is five miles north of Moab on US-191 — close enough that it can feel like an extension of the town rather than a separate wilderness.

Delicate Arch is the most famous: a 52-foot freestanding arch that appears on Utah's licence plates and draws more than a million visitors a year. The 3-mile round-trip hike to reach it is steep but manageable, crossing open slickrock with no shade. Do it at sunrise or late afternoon — midday in summer is brutal. Landscape Arch, in the Devils Garden area at the north end of the park, is longer and more fragile-looking — a thin ribbon of stone spanning 290 feet. The Windows section and Balanced Rock are accessible by short walks from the main road.

The park now requires timed-entry reservations from April to October — book well in advance at recreation.gov. Campground reservations at Devils Garden fill months ahead for spring weekends.

things to do sight
A story
Edward Abbey worked as a park ranger at Arches in the late 1950s and wrote Desert Solitaire (1968) from his experience — a fierce, lyrical account of the desert landscape and a critique of the tourism infrastructure being built to make it accessible. The book helped define the American wilderness writing genre. Abbey's ashes were scattered in the desert near Moab in 1989.