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Is visiting two National Parks in one day too ambitious? Perhaps! But that’s exactly what we did on our way home from a road trip to Colorado. Visiting Utah on this trip was a first for us in the state, and we really wanted to see both Canyonlands and Arches National Parks. So, we made a plan to spend a short amount of time driving through each park to see the highlights.
Canyonlands National Park
Canyonlands took my breath away with how vast the landscape was! Since we had limited time, we mostly stuck to a scenic drive through park, stopping a few places along the way.
Before getting into the park, we caught some nice views of The Monitor and Merrimac Buttes. It is incredible that these stand tall while the earth falls flat around them!
Pictures simply do not Canyonlands justice. Over the years, the water and wind has carved these beautiful, winding canyons that seem to go on for miles and it’s so quiet and peaceful!
One easy stop we made on our drive through Canyonlands was Mesa Arch, which was about a 30 minute walk roundtrip. This is a super easy trail and I highly recommend it to anyone visiting the park!
I wish I had more to say about this place, but since we were on a time schedule, we didn’t spend as much time here as we would have liked.
Arches National Park
Towards the end of the day, we made our way over to Arches. This was actually a real treat as we were in the park at sunset, and the light against the arches in the park was just beautiful!
I loved The Three Gossips and the rock that was shaped like a sheep! We weren’t able to see all of the arches, as some of them require that you hike down trails to get to them. But that’s okay, we saw so much in our short visit here.
Probably one of the more famous arches is Delicate Arch, which you may see on a lot of your computer screensavers! I was actually a little disappointed that you had to hike up to it to get a good view. I was not in the mood for hiking at that point in the day, so we just went to the lower viewing area to get our glimpse of this guy.
It’s hard to say what my favorite park of the day was, as they each had their own unique qualities and beautiful views. I would definitely not recommend packing these all into one day; however, we only had one day so that’s all we could do! I don’t regret a single moment of it and to be able to share this cool experience with my husband was so priceless.
Arches is a very nice park, but it was too hot for me to hike up to Delicate arch. I kind of regret it now… My favourite park around is Bryce canyon 🙂
We never made it to Bryce but that’s on the list for next time around! It was too late in the day for us to hike up to delicate arch. I was disappointed also. I wish it would have been closer to the road 🙂 oh well!