Moab and Fisher Towers

Last weekend Kevin and I snuk away for a one-night stay near Moab. I've blogged earlier about favorite places, and how Arches is special as the place that I returned to time and again and where I learned to love nature. In an effort to explore more and more of Utah's wilderness offerings, we've been more adventurous, and for that reason it's been two years since I visited my favorite places here.

Kevin and I came down early on Friday without stopping and arrived at the Arches National Park visitors' center to get our Fiery Furnace hiking permit. We hiked in the Fiery Furnace for a couple of hours and spent the rest of the afternoon on the Devil's Garden primitive loop trail. I'll talk more about these hikes in another post.

That evening, we set up our tent at the campground, one just outside of Arches, and went into Moab to get some dinner. We've adopted the Moab Diner as our favorite place to eat there after having a bad experience during the annual Jeep Rally where it was very hard to find good, timely service at any restaurant, and a local we spoke to said she always ate at the Moab Diner. So far it and its Kokapeli Chicken have been good to us. After dinner we went into some of the shops around town and eventually wandered into a used bookstore where I became fascinated by the rare book collection. I really like old books and the way they look, and this one had an original publication by Joseph Conrad as well as the original Harpers publication of Trilby, a novel I read in my senior seminar on the Pre-Raphaelites. It's a truly bad novel, but seeing the Victorian original was cool. We went to another store to look at their rare book collection, this time a lot of regional geographic literature and Ed Abbey books. I didn't buy anything, but I enjoyed this experience more than going to the gift shops and seeing the same old souvenirs at every store.

We went back to the campground and showered, played two-person spades, and fell asleep on our new-ish air mattresses. I love having these little backpacking air mattresses, and cannot imagine camping without them. I mention this because I was raised with a very different philosophy about camping--no mattress, no pillow, no pajamas--just your hiking clothes on. Now it feels like I'm in luxury!

We woke up early that morning to drive toward Moab, but to turn after the Colorado River to follow it up northeast of Arches National Park to get to the Fisher Towers and Onion Creek area, BLM land that I haven't hiked on since I was a child. We turned off on a dirt road to get to the Fisher Towers trailhead and started our hike about 9:00 a.m.

It was beautiful starting out in the shade of the towers as the sun gradually crept up over them.

It was a perfect time to start the hike while there was still plenty of shade. There were song birds singing everywhere, and the flowers were out full strength. It was so green at this time of year, and throughout the hike we had great views of the Colorado River, the towers, and the small canyons that descended away from the towers. I think that it would be very fun to explore these small canyons sometime.

A video of the view about 1/2 mile in from the trailhead.

One of these towers is called the Titan, and Kevin was telling me about how National Geographic sponsored a team of climbers to navigate up this tower a couple of years ago. This is also the proclaimed favorite spot of one of their world photographers.

Kevin at the end of the trail. It was a little over 2 miles one way out, but you can see that the sun had already come out by the time we reached this overlook.