So I had this naive notion that perhaps we’d wake up and go watch the sunrise at Delicate Arch. Nathan is smarter than me and vetoed that one pretty quickly. We still made fairly good time out of our campsite and got into Arches early in the morning. What I hadn’t considered was that it was, gulp, Memorial Day, and that of course meant that everyone and their two dogs was out hiking. (Which is great! Get outside! Not so great for a spoiled Ema who’s used to having entire trails to herself.)
Arches was honestly kind of miserable to hike in, just super dry and sooooo so so so hot with no relief and no shade and people everywhere. I’d like to go in the off season and do some of the less popular hikes and take time to examine every single super cool standing rock formation, because I think it has a lot of merit. Ultimately though, I felt like it had all of the bad parts of hiking in Utah and none of the good parts.