Nothing Mundane

November 24, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 49.1: Arches National Park

As a day trip from Moab, we headed in early June to the fourth of Utah’s “Mighty Five” national parks, Arches. Actually, we did this several times! Arches is just a few minutes from Moab, and since it was insanely hot, we decided to do multiple, shorter trips in the mornings and evenings. (National parks: the only good reason to wake up early.)

Arches is a desert park chock full of huge, stunning rock formations. The most famous formations are the natural rock arches, but there’s quite a lot more, sprinkled seemingly at random throughout the otherwise empty landscape. For example, near the entrance is a formation called Park Avenue, a massive – but thin – rock wall which evokes Manhattan skyscrapers.

Another famous landmark is called Balanced Rock, visible throughout much of the park’s scenic drive. The eponymous rock is the size of three school buses, and it somehow sits on an impossibly small pedestal, 128 feet above the desert floor. Someday it will fall – but hopefully not while any tourists are nearby.

Arches Square

Park Avenue and Balanced Rock were cool, but we came to Arches for one thing: arches! The park is well named, with over fourteen billion natural arches present inside its boundaries (approximately). Beautiful arches were found practically everywhere we looked. Our favorite of these was the magnificent Double Arch – note how small the person in the photo appears:

There were a lot more arches to be seen, all with unique names that we have since forgotten. Arches is definitely more fun to show than tell, so check out a few of our favorite arch photos below.

Most of the arches were found along the Devil’s Garden trail, an extremely cool hike which took us through, around, and over tall rock formations that looked much like shark fins. Well… maybe not entirely “cool,” since it was 100 degrees by noon, but we endured for the sake of adventure.

A Utah Delicacy

After roasting on our Devil’s Garden hike, we took a break from the heat for a couple days before returning to Arches one evening near sunset. Our aim was to visit the most famous landmark in all of Utah: Delicate Arch.

You may not have heard of it, but this iconic arch shows up everywhere in the state. It’s even on their license plates! And although we were prepared to be disappointed by the hype, we found that Delicate Arch more than lived up to its reputation.

The arch is gorgeous in person. It really is a perfect arch, tall, thin, and gracefully proportioned, and we were lucky enough to capture it during an incredible sunset. We took a lot of photos on our trip, but our Delicate Arch pictures are some of the best.

One thing you don’t see in our photos are people, but trust us, it was crowded. Arches is a pretty busy park in general, and Delicate Arch particularly so. We had to snap our pictures during the brief windows between selfie-takers, which isn’t that unusual but does add a degree of difficulty. There was quite a crowd sitting in the amphitheater-like area overlooking the arch, just watching and enjoying the sunset. It made for quite a silhouette.

Twinkle Twinkle

It was dark as we headed back from Delicate Arch, so we decided to try something we’d been meaning to do for a while: night photos! We stopped near Park Ave., got out our tripod, set up the camera, and… realized we had no idea how to take night photos.

Luckily for us, a young man on a motorcycle stopped to take his own photos, and he noticed us peering at the buttons on the camera and Googling things like “night photo how” on our phones. He was kind enough to give us a quick tutorial and help us get set up, something we’re eternally grateful for. And with a little help from our new friend, the night photos we took at Arches turned out pretty well! They’re a little blurry and digitally “noisy,” but we’re still happy with how they came out.

It doesn’t look it in the photo, but it was almost pitch-black outside. However, the camera collects enough starlight over thirty seconds to light the entire shot.

By the way, after our photographer friend left to go further down the path, there was silence for a moment. But he must have found another group, because we soon heard him patiently give the same tutorial to another group of clueless newbies.

Something tells us there’s a business opportunity there.

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We’ve reached the end of our roadtrip! We’re settling down in Denver, but we’re going to keep making blog posts and posting our favorite photos from the trip, so stay tuned for more.

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November 8, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 49: Moab, Utah

After a long day of slot-canyon hiking and goblin hoodoo appreciating, we arrived in Moab late on Memorial Day. We stayed for a glorious 10 days, an eternity in Heather-and-Jake-roadtrip-world, in part because Moab is just so damn cool. It’s probably the most EXTREME place in the country, activity-wise, with world-famous mountain biking we were far too terrified to try, along with rock climbing, whitewater rafting, desert backpacking, hot air ballooning – you name it. It’s exactly the place you should go if you feel like tempting death on your vacation.

The inhabitants of Moab are mostly badass adventurer types, and they drive pickup trucks to match. Moab is located in the for-real desert, and there are a lot of options for off-roading, in the sense that you can just drive wherever the hell you want because there’s nothing else there. It’s the only place we haven’t been angry to see crazily jacked-up pickup trucks at the grocery store. (Looking at you, Houston!) And although it can be touristy, Moab isn’t so bad compared to most, and there’s even a brewery serving real, full-strength beer. Take that, Utah!

Us in most of Utah.

A Land of Ice and Fire

So Moab is certainly cool, but also, dear God it was hot. Triple digits were not uncommon, and it felt much hotter than that. The desert sun is unrelenting (and rarely bothered by clouds), and the ground heats up over the course of the day until it just feels like you’re standing in a furnace. The locals were unfazed, but we found the sensation of slow-roasting ourselves to be unpleasant. For that reason, our adventuring options were mostly limited to the hours of 6 am to noon, by which we of course mean 10 am to noon, or after sunset.

Because of the heat, we ended up missing out on a few things we wanted to try. However, we still got some quality visits in to Moab’s two famous national parks, Canyonlands and Arches, which will be coming in individual blog posts due to their “awesomeness” and our “crippling number of photos.” We also visited a few of Moab’s other sites, which we’ll detail below.

One amusing aspect of our stay? The campground we stayed in had several cottonwood trees, which are large pretty trees that release their seeds for a few weeks in the spring. It happened to be that time of the year, and we found out that “release their seeds” means “release their seeds ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE CONTINUOUSLY FOREVER.” It looked like snow, notwithstanding the scorching heat, and it accumulated like it, too: the maintenance crew cleaned it up with snow shovels.

We took a video; it’s kind of relaxing.

A video posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on Jun 5, 2016 at 1:44pm PDT

Archhole

Right outside of Moab, there is a miles-long stretch where dozens of people practice rock-climbing, which means parking along the road and setting up mats on a random rock wall to try their hand (or their toddlers’ hands). Just past that, we parked in a lot near some railroad tracks to visit a TripAdvisor-recommended area favorite: Corona Arch.

Now, Arches National Park is nearby, and we’ll have many, many more natural arches to show you, but Corona Arch is just too cool not to share. It’s utterly massive, unlike many of the arches at Arches, and when we visited, almost nobody was around. (Which is definitely unlike Arches.)

By the way, once upon a time, the “world’s largest rope swing” hung from Corona Arch, allowing a 100+ foot pendulum freefall (here’s a video). Sadly, a few years ago someone died from a rope set too long, and another become critically injured. So: no more rope swing, but Corona Arch is pretty great anyway, and the hike to get there was absolutely beautiful.

Jurassic High-Five

One of us (*cough*Heather*cough*) has an unreasonable obsession with dinosaurs, and that person forces the other, more handsome person to stop at anything with a dinosaur statue (e.g., Oregon). Well, Moab and the area to the north are some of the country’s most fertile ground for finding fossils, and a huge replica dinosaur park was recently erected just outside of town. We saw it while driving in, so… that was that. We were going to visit the Moab Giants.

OK, so even the skeptics among us have to admit that the life-sized statues were pretty impressive. There was quite a variety of dinosaurs, all set in the slightly surreal environment of the Moab desert. We also liked that there was a real effort at scientific accuracy, as long as we ignored the weird, crotchless humans on the accompanying display panels. Some of the dinosaurs even had feathers!

Of course, we mostly just took goofy pictures with them.

Home Sweet Hole

Who doesn’t love weird roadside attractions? We obviously do, and the Hole N” The Rock house definitely qualifies. The house is aptly named – nearly a century ago, the house was excavated out of a giant rock wall by a former miner. More specifically, it was painstakingly blasted out with dynamite, because apparently that was something you could just do back in the day.

Albert Christenson, the man responsible for the house, spent 12 years removing 50,000 cubic feet of rock, doing the work with just the help of his trusty mule. Albert and his wife, Gladys, then lived in the home for decades. She passed away in 1957, and it has been preserved ever since. (Or something like that. We didn’t fact-check this.)

We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside, but here’s some from their website. It was surprisingly normal inside, quite spacious, and keeps a constant temperature. If it didn’t take twelve years of backbreaking labor, we’d certainly see the appeal.

A man of many talents, Albert eventually turned his house into a roadside restaurant, and then a tourist attraction in its own right. The house is filled with his own art, some quite good, some… less so, and there’s an enormous bust of FDR on the outside. Along with a lot of other weird crap.

For some reason, Albert also got into taxidermy (a sentence that never ends well), and his first project was preserving his trusty mule for all eternity. Today, it stands proudly in the living room, facing out the window. We love the thought! However, it may have been a little ambitious of a first project – the final product landed somewhere between “imperfect” and “nightmare made real.”

Hey, just like the 2016 presidential election, am I right?

via GIPHY

Internet Pen-pals

A final reason we liked Moab is that we actually talked to some humans here! There aren’t a ton of young people roaming the country in an RV, but all the ones who are use Instagram, so we’re online-friendly with quite a few couples like us.

In Moab, we met up with one such couple, Anna (@annamnic) and John, who are from England and were in the US for a year. They were friendly and fun, and we swapped RVing stories – basically, “here are all the times we made a horrible mistake.” We learned, for example, that it takes a shockingly long time to actually buy an RV in the US if you are normally from England. In addition, if you’re abroad living off your savings, and your country bizarrely decides to leave the European Union and tank its currency, life gets… interesting.

In any event, it was great meeting up with them, especially since it came during a two-month stretch in which we saw literally nobody else we knew. Pretty daunting, which is why we’re really grateful to all the people that followed along with us online during our trip. It was like having hundreds of internet pen-pals! We never really felt like we were alone. And if you’re reading this, you’re probably one of those people, so – thanks!

Now bring it in for a hug.