Moab - Day 2, Part 5

Gavin thought that along the way we could act like we were in an action film hanging off the side of an immense cliff wall if we took a strategic picture that cropped out the ground.  You can see how terrified he must feel all of about three feet off the ground.

I believe this is Partition Arch because there is a smaller second arch just to the right of the picture with a "partition" between the two arches.  This one was pretty cool because you could look down to the whole valley below through it.  The kids also found some small chipmunks to chase around while we rested for a bit.

Here is one of Tara and I looking through the same Arch.  We are sure looking like some serious hikers here!

After this trio of Arches, we continued to the back side of the loop toward Double O Arch.  The trail actually got even more sketchy (from a parents with kids perspective) as we continued.  Behind us is this fairly skinny rock section that you have to walk down and its basically a cliff on either side.  Normally, it wouldn't be a big deal but with two wily kids running around it's enough to make for quite the stressful passage.

 We did survive and make it to the Double O Arch, which turns out to be two arches stacked on top of each other.  The landscape was amazing to just take in and hike through.  We had to make a choice to continue around the loop or turn around at this point.  We opted to cut the day a bit short and head back as the wind was starting to kick up and the kids were starting to feel like we had hiked enough.  All in all we hiked for 5.8 miles and it took us about 2:45:00 for our loop.  Not a bad second half of the day and I think we were all excited to make it back to the car.  I know for myself, this was quite a lot of hiking on my still-healing ankle.  I had been wearing a brace to hike with but it was starting to get sore by the time we got back.