When hastily planning our trip we figured we would head back to Vegas on Thursday evening in order to make our mid-day flight on Friday. What a waste that would have been! It was a pleasant surprise to learn(again, for me) that we crossed a time zone at the Utah border. The extra hour to get to the airport on Friday morning was just enough to get us to change our itinerary. With another full day to hike we decided to go for Kolob Arch.
We got an "early" start for the Kolob Canyon section of the park since it was easily 45 minutes away. It meant driving back to LaVerkin and then heading north. We stopped by the grocery store at the traffic light to pick up some snackies. There was also a coffee shack in the parking lot that made a mean cup of whatever you needed to wake up. Two cups to go and we were at the Kolob Canyon Visitor Center by 9:00 to check in. The ranger gave us an update on the weather and asked a couple of questions to make sure we knew we were good to go. We re-checked our pack at the Lee Pass trailhead on Kolob Canyon Road about 10min later.
It was cloudy and a bit windy, a chance of thunderstorms and, fortunately, pleasantly cool. Considering we were going to do a 14 mile R/T with a fair amount of altitude change we didn't mind the conditions.
The hike to The Arch is somewhat the opposite of Angels Landing. One starts off with a decent of about 1000'+ over the first mile or so. Compared to Angels, this is fairly gentle as you wind through trees and up and down dry washes. The red soil and rocks compliment the greens of the junipers and other trees. We followed Timber Creek as Kolob Canyon Road disappeared behind and over our right shoulders.
Unfortunately, we didn't stop to take photos on the way in, mindful of the length of the hike we were taking.
We saw several of these flowers. I'm guessing they are Wild Columbine(please let me know if I'm wrong). Another few miles and we were on the canyon floor.
