#3-OUr favorite parent and kid memories of Arches National Park

By Abby McAllister

So, we are in week 3 of our 5 week countdown to our Utah guide book launch party.  While it is available already on amazon we are going to have a little celebration that may include a sweet deal on the book...more on that later.  Anyway, we are using these 5 weeks to take a trip down memory lane as we remember out favorite moments in the 5 Utah parks that stole our hearts.  One memory from a parent and one from a kid.  Here they are-memories of Arches National Park!

By Abby McAllister

Even the smaller arches are amazing

View of the La Sal Mountains

​I feel like such a cheater but I just can't pick one most memorable moment in Arches NP.  I guess maybe instead of a memory from our trip,  I have a favorite feeling that Arches brings me.  When I visit Arches I am overwhelmed, many times, with a feeling that is hard to describe.  I feel like my chest is expanding beyond what I can sustain.  I feel at once tiny like an ant and enormous like I might fill the space all around me.  I am significant and simultaneously superfluous.  Sometimes it happens in a wide open space like the time we all were walking across a huge sandstone fin with the desert landscape stretching away all around us.  It also comes over me in tiny secluded box canyons where we discover an arch that seems it had been waiting just for us for ages!  I felt it when we were crossing from one group of sandstone to another across a desert prairie of bunch grass waving in the evening breeze.  Or even along "Park Avenue," surrounded by other visitors, as we stare in wonder at the cliffs soaring above us.  I want to say that maybe it is a desert thing but the fact is, I haven't felt it as strongly or consistently in any of the other Utah desert parks.  Additionally I have felt the same feeling sitting on a beach in the Dominican Republic, staring out to sea.  I can't explain it but I crave that feeling.  I seek it and when I find it I revel in it.  I felt it in Arches in my teen years and many years later, in my adult life, I was still longing to go back.  I was thankful that the feeling still found me all those years later.  I'm not sure I can name it.  Can you?  What is that feeling?  Where have you felt it before?  Tell me so I can go there too!

By Logan McAllister (10)

​One of my favorite times in Arches is when we went to see one of the arches and the path was sandy. It was about a quarter of a mile to the arch. You could see the arch from the path and when we got to the arch there were two slopes, one on either side of the arch. You could climb to the right or the left of the arch. I enjoyed being up by the arch but then had to leave. There was a little side trail that my two brothers and I followed. It was a long little trail but it finally bent around a corner and we saw a huge cut out in the cliff we were following. We searched and saw a bunch of snake holes. We searched around a little more to the left and found a little cliff. My brothers and I climbed it. Then our mom took pictures of us then we climbed and hiked back to the car and left.  

It is a short walk to this amazing arch, and there are lots of places for the kids to climb and explore.