Devil’s Garden is the farthest you can drive into the National Park with a standard vehicle.ĭepending on the time of year that you are traveling to Arches, parking at this trailhead can be a little tricky. Upon entering the park, you simply drive the Main Park Road until you reach the end. Map overview via FATMAP Trailhead Locationįinding the Devil’s Garden Trailhead is pretty easy. Without further ado, let’s take a look at what you can expect on the Devil’s Garden Trail! A video of the Devil’s Garden Trail in Arches National Park However long you decide to hike for, you can be sure that it is time well spent in the National Park. If you do decide to hike the entire loop, it’s possible to see 8 different and uniquely beautiful arches. The entire loop is 7.9 miles long, with sections of the trail that require rock scrambling and carefully traversing fins with a considerable drop-off.ĭo not let this scare or deter you! A great characteristic of this trail is that you don’t have to complete the entire thing to see some amazing sights. The Devil’s Garden Trail is the longest and most difficult trail in Arches National Park.
Hiking is without a doubt one of the better ways to explore the park, and perhaps the best hike to set your sights on is the Devil’s Garden Trail. The whole area feels like an alien landscape, which, if you’re like me, calls you to explore.Īrches National Park hosts a wide variety of geological formations, including: arches (obviously), spires, pinnacles, towering walls, and giant sandstone fins. Much of the trail is just walking in washes though.Arches National Park is a great place to get acquainted with Southeast Utah. A pair of trekking poles could be really helpful for this part of the hike. On some areas of the primitive portion of this hike, you go up and down some narrow sandstone fins, including descending some steep slickrock slides, but that’s about as difficult as it gets. American Indians have often used the desert varnish on rocks as a canvas for rock art (to see some pictures of these type of petroglyphs check out our blog post about Delicate Arch or about Grime’s Point in Nevada.) Primitive Trailīack on the Devils Garden Primitive Trail, we began crossing areas of deep sand alternating with areas of slick rock. This smooth, dark varnish is a layer of iron or manganese on the surface of the rock. The Dark Angel turned out to be a tall, narrow obelisk of stone that has been stained by a desert varnish. We just saw the trail marked with the evocative name “Dark Angel,” and we knew that we had to check it out. Prior to this hike, we had no idea what the Dark Angel formation would look like. At the end of this spur trail is a sandstone formation called Dark Angel.
On our way to next the stop, which was at the end of a half mile spur trail, we got quite far off the trail in an area of sand and juniper brush due to deep snow obscuring the trail. Today around 4000 people might visit the park on a summer day and the line of cars trying to get into the park can stretch to a mile long, forcing rangers to close the park to additional visitors. With only rough roads providing access to the park, a key aspect of Abbey’s experience in the park was the solitude of the desert landscape. His time in the park provided the material for his celebrated book “ Desert Solitaire.” He described the landscape of Arches as “league on league of red cliff and arid tablelands, extending through purple haze over the bulging curve of the planet to the ranges of Colorado - a sea of desert.”Īrches National Park was very different in Abbey’s time. Arches was once home to the well-known nature writer, Edward Abbey, who worked as a park ranger when Arches and Canyonlands were still national monuments. The absurd natural beauty of Arches has led to it becoming one of the most popular national parks in the country. Arches National Park is a strange world of red slick rock, loops and arches of rock rising out of the desert, and a confusion of eroded rock fins and spires.
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