Our final day of our adventure in Moab started with breakfast at Denny's. Yes, I know, quite adventurous. But since we didn't end up there on Turkey Day, we thought we'd enjoy breakfast there on Black Friday.
Having fueled ourselves with loads of smoked, burned pig and carbohydrate-rich griddle offerings, we cleared out of our motel and headed to the park for our last destination.
The Fiery Furnace.
Those gorgeous red rocks, called fins, are what virtually all arches begin as. They are sandstone walls, each anywhere from 5 - 15 feet thick (some even thicker) and as softer sandstone underneath erodes, you are sometimes left with an arch.
The Fiery Furnace is a particularly dense area of fins, with no marked trail, so you either have to get a hiking permit and somehow prove that you aren't an idiot and have the capability to navigate your way through the unmarked maze (I would be unable to prove my lack of idiocy), or you go on a 3 hour ranger-led hike through a small portion of the area. Given my already admitted inability to find my way, much less convince anyone in charge of permits that I wouldn't get hopelessly lost, we chose to follow a ranger.
The Fiery Furnace is so named because it appears to be aglow with fire, especially in morning and afternoon. Even from a far, it's a truly awe-inspiring vista.
We met our ranger in the parking lot along with over 30 other people. Yes, that means with our family there were over 35 of us. When we signed up, they told us the hikes were limited to 25. I guess maybe they counted some of the kids as 1/2 a person...or something.
In any case, at noon we headed into the furnace, following our trusty ranger. As we strolled down the hill to the base of the outer fins, our ranger stopped, once to remind us to minimize our impact by staying in a line, and then a second time to give us a little info on the formations we'd be seeing in the Fiery Furnace.
We were a little worried when, by 12:30, we had spent approximately 22 minutes listening to Mr. Ranger and 8 minutes actually hiking. And during those 22 minutes we heard as much about his former professor's revolving Cadillac collection, and the places our ranger has lived, as we did about the formations themselves. While his professor's car fetish was mildly fascinating...or simply odd...we really wanted to see the fiery furnace. After all, that is what we signed up and paid our hard earned cash for.
The face says it all.
Eventually we did get to enter the fins and begin to see the wonders.
This one is called Skull Arch. Can you see it?
This is Kissing Turtles Arch.
So cute.
There were plenty of tight spaces to crawl through.
And lots of magnificent sights.
This is what the Smith girls look like while sitting through the 7th ranger "talk".
Please, just make it stop.
In truth, we were all glad we went. It was a spectacular way to end our trip to Moab.
And we have many funny memories of our ranger.
Perhaps the best being the ever decreasing vision of him in the rear view mirror.
1 comment:
The fiery furnace is one of our favorite sights in Moab... it must be time for a return trip, I'm feeling wistful for the always-entertaining (laugh at, laugh with, whatever) ranger tour!
Post a Comment