The Ugly Truth of Delicate Arch

May 19, 2026  — Day 56

Sun Outdoors Canyonlands, Moab UT

So today we’re doing the Shafer Trail. We hadn’t planned on doing 2 trails in a row, we need a break from the Jeep and the washboard roads beating our bodies up, but 11AM-ish line into Arches looked to be about an hour long. Arches no longer has timed entry tickets, so, like Monument Valley, you just wait in line until someone else leaves. No thanks.

And we still didn’t feel well enough for anything that didn’t involve sitting in the Jeep, so off we went to the Shafer Trail!

To get to the Shafer Trail we need to drive the Potash Road, which turns into the Shafer Trail at the Potash plant. It is a beautiful road, signs warned us to slow down as we approached, and sure enough, we found people in the road, rock climbing, and then a sign proclaiming “Petroglyphs,” and then we pulled over.

Right where we stopped we could see some petroglyphs on the rocks. Look in the dark spots, maybe zoom in or something.

Here you can see some more, look at the dark spot left of center.

Yes, these are far off the ground. But unlike the ones from last year, it isn’t water erosion that has made them so high, they are high because machines took away the ground when they made the road!

The rock face was sheer straight up.

The next sign said dinosaur tracks, so of course we pulled over. You can see two tracks in this photo. We’ll wait, we dare you to find them.

The trail up was gross, rocky scrambles. We actually made it way farther up than this but the tracks were nowhere to be found. Sure, the two above could be found, but we had a 4 foot scramble up to get there, and they were still well above our heads.. We gave up. Later on, we read some travel blogs, you eventually find some iron sighting rods you look down and you can see the tracks across the road and across the Colorado River. No thanks, we’re glad we stopped.

Onward to the Shafer Trail.

But wait, something is wrong. We have about 1/4 tank of gas. This is’t good. We stopped within sight of the Potash Ponds, had lunch, and turned around. Hmmm, let’s try Arches again, and we got in!

This is Park Avenue, perhaps our favorite spot in the park. No arches, but cool. No Arches is a theme you see, we’ll come back to that.

Lovely vistas, vistas without any arches.

More no Arches rocks. We were starting to get a little annoyed, there are 2,000 arches here and we’ve seen one, a baby arch barely worth talking about, really, it was tiny.

Paul shooting Balancing Rock, which, is not an arch.

They invited you to walk around, and see how the arch changed. We both thought it was pretty dorky, but, you know what, the short hike was really nice, sometimes the rock was edge one, sometimes face on.

Finally, an arch! Several of them!! But, it was really hot and crowded. We took a few photos of the Windows area. We knew we were coming back another day. Plus we wanted to save ourselves for Delicate Arch, the famous one.

And a telephoto closeup.

This is Double Arch.

We drove on to Delicate Arch and discovered the ugly truth. You have three view points. One is a short hike where you are encouraged to use your binoculars to see it from about a mile away. From that point you can do what turns into a hard hike to get closer and see through most, but not all, of it from a distance. Neither option appealed to us. We wanted to be at the arch itself. Up the road is the third option with the super crowed parking lot. For this option you make the a rocky, no shade, 3.5 mile, dangerous spots at times, hike to get right up into it. Nope, not for us. We’re here for the fun not for unpleasant experiences.

So we drove on down to the Fiery Furnace. This lights up at sunset, if you’re are lucky, with a nice red glow. Were we several hours before sunset and there were already people with chairs there! It was getting too hot for Susan so she stayed in the Jeep. We also skipped the next Arch because we were really done with this park. At some point red rocks and arches get boring.

Back home, a nice sunset happened. Those folks at Fiery Furnace must have had a real treat. Paul popped over the Arches View Church, which is in the parking lot of the campground. He could tell that it had lit up from the sunset, but he was just a tad too late to catch it in it’s full glory.

2,000 Arches, yikes. We’ll come back, and give the Windows and Double a try. We were pretty disappointed with this National Park. Don’t get us wrong here. It was nice to do it and being in the area we wouldn’t have missed it. But this didn’t live up to its hype. If it was named “Awesome Views with Scattered Arches National Monument” we wouldn’t have been dissapointed. We’re sorry to gripe so much but we had been sick for so long and had really been looking forwards to this.