Traveling in Blanquillo AND MORE

Arches National Park, and Devil's Garden campground

3/3/2019

In September, 2014, we took a trip to Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. The first 2 weeks were in Colorado as part of a church mission trip and we stayed in an RV park. Nothing exciting, mostly full timers. We greatly enjoyed 2 days in Rocky Mountain National Park.

After that, we took a week to return to California through Utah and Nevada, and visited 4 national parks on the way back.

The first park was Arches National Park. It was definitely a great place to visit. The arches and other rock formations are spectacular. The one disappointment was that it rained while we were there and we couldn't get to Delicate Arch because the road was closed due to flooding. We thoroughly enjoyed the other sites.

We decided that we would camp in National Park campgrounds wherever possible on this trip. We did with one exception: after 4 nights in Arches, we wanted a shower, so we stayed in an RV park near Capitol Reef rather than in the park campground, which looked great and we were sorry to miss it. And this experience led us to sell that trailer and buy a new one which is fully self contained.

In Arches, we stayed in the only campground in the park, Devil's Garden. It is at the far north end of the park, about 20 miles from the entrance which is at the south end of the park, so we got to see a lot of the park from the road while driving through to the campground.

The campground blew us away. It was the best. campground. ever - if you don't mind a park with only flush toilets and basically no other facilities. Still, we loved it.

We were in site 18, near the bathhouse and, as it turned out, the amphitheatre and Skyline Arch which is right next to the amphitheatre. The campground is one long road with a loop at the end. The road starts going uphill, peaks at the amphitheatre, then goes downhill to the loop end. Our spot was near the high point and we had a fabulous view of the rocks near us and the mountains in the distance. After arriving and experiencing a brief but intense storm, we spent the next two days touring and hiking around the park. (We went to Canyonlands NP for the third day, and enjoyed it, too, but I wouldn't want to camp there as the campgrounds were much more primitive than Devil's Garden.) This was enough time to see the highlights, but 4 days would have been even better.

Although we plan to go back and stay again in the campground, it will be interesting to see how we do with the new trailer. We will be able to shower but there is no dump station at the park so we would have to drive to Moab for that. We will learn this summer how far we can go before needing to dump, and how well the solar recharges the batteries.