Canyonlands NP, UT - Apr 20, 2025

Day Thirteen - Apr 20, 2025

Monticello, Utah to Helper, Utah

Tonight's Lodging: Rock House, AirBNB

Today's Weather: High in the high 60’s, low in the mid 40’s. Beautiful

High Point: Arches in Arches

Low Point: Through fault of our own, waiting an hour and a half in line to enter Arches National Park

Touristic Events: The Devils Garden Double O Arch out and back trail

Travel Tip: Sometimes there is no authoritative source for the information you need online. Even if there should be

Miles By Automobile: 177

Miles By Foot: 8.1

Daily Didactic

Today was at times the most frustrating day of our trip and also just wonderful. Such are the joys of travel. We started at a decidedly more leisurely pace this morning at Fort Abajo in Monticello. We had three objectives. Drive to Moab and most likely eat lunch, use our timed entry permit for Arches to hike the out and back trail to Double O Arch, and then drive on to this evening’s AirBNB in Helper to cut our extraction drive in half.

Not too surprisingly, we have the driving to Moab and eating part nailed. After a lovely Easter lunch at the Moab Food Truck Court, we tooled on to the Arches National Park entrance gate. For geographic and popularity reasons, Arches has moved to a timed entry system. What this means is that you have to get a $2 permit to enter in an hour window during the day. Our dilemma is that we intended to carpool in, but with two vehicles needed to park one somewhere. We couldn’t find any information on the Arches NPS web pages and you can’t reach anyone by phone, but we took chatGPT’s emphatic assurance that we could leave one at the visitor center. That was wrong. We should have just left one at the food court.

After a thirty five minute wait in line, we were rejected. We drove two miles to Lion’s Park, parked, and returned to wait almost another hour before successfully gaining entrance. From that point on the day was predictably better. Our hike was good fun and the following two hour drive to Helper was without event. After checking in to tonight’s AirBNB (Rock House) we had some leftover dinner, a little TV, and turned in two hours from Salt Lake (Tim and Anne) and two blocks from tomorrow night’s AirBNB (Brian and Theresa).