After having the a great night of sleep in Moab with a bellies full of pizza, we headed super early in the morning in an attempt to catch Delicate Arch around sunrise.

When places are way too popular, it totally sucks out the enjoyment I have about visiting them. Arches National Park is one of the most popular parks in the system and requires reservations for entering the park. If you don’t have one, you can’t enter the park between 7am and 4pm, April through October.

Your reservation is good for a one-hour entry period for that specific day. It costs $2 per vehicle. If you’ll be there multiple days, you need multiple reservations. You can book on Recreation.gov up to six months in advance, here: https://www.recreation.gov/timed-entry/10088426.

We did have reservations and like the Type A person I am, I booked ’em way ahead of time. I got them for 7am-8am. We entered the park around 6am anyway, so we didn’t have to show the ranger at the gate proof of that – but he was still there to collect the usual fee (we have the Inter-agency annual pass) and give us our map.

Delicate Arch was the only thing we cared to see in Arches on this trip, so we bee-lined it to the parking lot. It already almost half full.

The 3.5 mile-ish trail starts by guiding you over a bridge, through some sandy trails, and then up a gradual descent to a rocky hillside that you climb allll the way up.

See all the tiny little people up there?

At the top, there’s a big ol’ pile of cairns which I thought was adorbs.

After moseying along the sandstone trail and straight up an very exposed hillside… voila.

Not gonna lie, I was a huge fan.

We hung out on the rim and soaked it all in for a while (with hundreds of our new friends).

It was fun watching everyone stand in line to take their own little photo shoots under the arch. Everyone was super respectful, but after a while we were over the crowd and more people began to fill in than to leave out.

We turned around the way we came, down along the exposed rock wall and down the loooong pink rocky hillside.

You can see the tiny little parking lot on the left side, in the middle-ish.

At the beginning of the trail, there was an opportunity to scope out some petroglyphs we’d skipped on the way in.

Then we returned to the van in parking lot where we had the best breakfast ever.

And of course we had to get our little passport stamp!

Delicate Arch via All Trails:
https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/utah/delicate-arch-trail

Book a timed entry permit for Arches National Park here:
https://www.recreation.gov/timed-entry/10088426

Learn more about Arches National Park via NPS:
https://www.nps.gov/arch/index.htm