Hiking the Devil’s Garden Trail (with 8 arches!) at Arches National Park

For our first day at Arches National Park, we hiked as many short trails as possible including the famous Delicate Arch, Park Avenue, Double Arch, and so much more. And for our second and final day at Arches, we're focusing on one trail in the park, the Devil's Garden Trail, which has a total of eight arches that we will get to explore. Besides the Delicate Arch Trail, Devil's Garden is what we are most excited to do while here at Arches. We hear it's one of the best trails in the park. It is tricky, thrilling, just an overall exciting adventure. It's about eight miles and it's a loop trail and it's split between the main trail and then the primitive trail which requires some rock scrambling. You can go clockwise or counterclockwise and we read that there's pros and cons to going either way. We're going to go clockwise to hopefully see some of the more popular arches, get a little bit of solitude, beat the crowds, and then come back the primitive way. This trail starts out hot. Only five minutes into the trail and we're already coming upon two named arches. The two arches right at the beginning of the trail are the Tunnel Arch and Pine Tree Arch. Tunnel Arch was high up on a rock face you couldn't get to, but this one's looking like you might be able to walk up under it. I think one thing that's been a nice surprise about Arches is you hear about the Delicate Arch and the more popular arches, but then there's these ones you've never heard of and they're ginormous and they're still very impressive. I think our deer count is up to 11 now this morning. I've seen so many deer. We see deer all the time in Texas, but for some reason it's extra exciting to see them on trails. We made it to Landscape Arch, the longest arch in the world, at least in North America, that we've read. It's 306 feet long, over a football field long, and we read different reports on the width of it between 6 feet and 11 feet at its thinnest areas. It's nuts. It is, it looks like you could just go hi-yah and like chop it in half and you're not able to get right up to it because in 1991 a huge 60 foot slab of rock fell off of the arch. There were people hiking here at the time and one guy caught it on camera. He didn't catch it, he caught it on his camera. Yeah, he didn't catch it. He got a photo of it which, it's kind of a fear actually as we've been walking up underneath these because the arches take so long to form, but they can break and crumble. You just don't know when it's going to happen, so it's kind of good to think about that and keep that in perspective as you're exploring here. Admire it, but admire it quickly if you're under it. So once you're done admiring the Landscape Arch, you can keep going on a trail. It's called the Primitive Trail. This will take you clockwise around the loop and it'll take you to tons more arches. It gets a bit more rugged and then as the name implies, more primitive. So apparently going through that stretch there we went by where Wall Arch was in 2008. It unfortunately fell and it's a bummer because at the time it was actually the 12th largest arch in the park. This is huge. I thought this was just like a little cove. It kind of first looked like just like a cozy cove at someone's house with a Similar to our time at Bryce Canyon where that park's all about the hoodoos and you're basically just looking at hoodoos the whole time. Arches is very much about all the arches, so you think you'd get hoodooed out or arched out, but so far we do not feel that way. We've seen I think five arches this morning plus a ton yesterday and every single one is different than the last and each one we're like, this one's so cool, oh new favorite. We just love them all and it's kind of hard to get sick of them because they're just so wild. We thought Dark Angel was an arch so we get here and we're like where is it, where is it? Then we realize it's this really tall crazy rock in front of us that kind of has some dark colors to it which is why I think it's the Dark Angel. I think we're on the more primitive area now. It said primitive trail for a while but I think this is when things actually start to get a little trickier. This section was a bit uh a bit of a exciting. Yeah no it really wasn't that bad but you do have to kind of climb down this I wouldn't say sheer wall. Slick rock. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, I thought it was really fun. The shoes were pretty grippy on the rock though so it wasn't horrible. We've made it to the part that everyone has warned us about. There's this medium-sized puddle. Yeah. That has some logs in it that you could either go through but it's really gross looking or you have to scale a wall to get around it. Yeah. So we just get wet. We did just see a couple guys go across. It's doable both ways without getting wet but I don't know. I don't know, we'll see. I haven't decided. Go quick! Well we uh took the easy way out and just went in the water. Yeah. I think most people are scaling the wall. It's just so slick. Yeah. And we saw multiple people almost slide down into the water. Yeah. So we figured some squishy shoes. It's nice and sunny. They'll dry fast. It was refreshing to walk through for me. Yeah. No, it actually kind of felt good. It's pretty hot out but it was kind of dirty water and you can't see anything. I do feel like a loser for not scaling it but you just, you can do it. We saw several people do it. You just gotta, you gotta send it and go for it. You know but at the end of the day just do what you feel most comfortable with. We felt safest going in the water. Yeah. So that's what we did and if everyone else does it a different way at least we did it safely. That's what I'm telling myself. We made it back and according to the all trails recording it said we did nine miles. So a mile-ish more than we thought and we were gone for about five hours but that was a great trail. It's probably one of the best or the best trail experience here in the park because it's not, you're not just going to go see one thing like the delicate arch or some specific arch. You're seeing stuff the entire time. Like there was no point where we didn't have a view of something or we weren't seeing an arch. It was just gorgeous. Yeah it was a very awe-inspiring and like you said immersive experience learning about the park over the last couple days. You hear about how the arches are formed and you hear things like 300 million years ago this happened and 100 million years ago and so now we're seeing the result of that and this is kind of deep but we're kind of uh we're lucky to like see that and see this like little snapshot in time and be able to walk amongst the fins and the arches and all the stuff. It was very very cool. They take so long to form exactly but then they can come crumbling down or pieces break off at any point so we just feel lucky that we were able to experience this and just experience this park and see this piece of history and science and nature before one day it's not here which would be really sad. On that sad note um well to continue the sad news that was actually our last thing we're doing here at Arches National Park. We loved the park way more than we thought we would to be honest. We were nervous like all the popular ones like Yellowstone and things like that all the classic national parks we were nervous it wasn't gonna live up to the hype but just like Yellowstone it lived up to the hype and it exceeded it. It was awesome. Absolutely and we're now officially done with the Mighty Five National Parks but not really because we have one more area of another park we're gonna go explore but first we're gonna celebrate with some ice cream. We came to a spot called Moab Garage Co which is one of our favorite places in Moab. I think we've been every single time we've been in town they have coffee, lunch, breakfast items and ice cream. We both got our um things we combinations we love we got chocolate peanut butter and sea salt caramel nut. I feel like there's like ribbons of caramel going through there and then you've got the nuts in there give you a little bit of a crunch. Heck yeah. So they used to do liquid nitrogen ice cream and so we're a little sad that they aren't doing that anymore but this ice cream still looks really good. Oh that is like a melted Reese's peanut butter cup. I don't know if they make their ice cream or if they get it from somewhere else but on a warm late spring Moab day after hiking nine miles this is the best thing ever. I'm so happy. Look who's driving the van. This is a very rare occurrence. As we mentioned earlier we've now officially been to all of the Mighty Five Utah National Parks but we're currently driving to a different area of Canyonlands called the Needles District. We made it about 10 minutes away from the Needles District of Canyonlands to a campground called Creek Pasture. We keep calling it Pasture Creek. It's Creek Pasture and check out this amazing view. It's $15 a night and it's a first-come first-served campsite so we were kind of nervous that we weren't going to get a spot but we got lucky and we got one of the last I think there's three left so we got one of those. We were so nervous but we are so pumped. We're going to enjoy more of the campsite tomorrow but for tonight we're just going to make dinner, go to bed early. Get out of the sun. Like probably 7 p.m. Get out of this brutal sun because we have a really long hike in the Needles District tomorrow.