The hike to Delicate Arch is the most popular hike in Arches National Park. It’s a short, easy hike to an iconic southwest landmark. It’s worth the short trek, probably even with the crowds, but we highly recommend doing this hike early in the day like we did!
Delicate Arch is the most famous of the over 2,000 natural sandstone arches in Arches National Park. It’s an iconic landmark of the American Southwest, so it’s understandable why the hike to get up close and personal with it is always so busy.
We knew this, so we set off on the short hike just after 7 o’clock in the morning. The trailhead parking lot is the largest one in the park to accommodate for the hike’s popularity; when we arrived that morning there were maybe 10 or so other early bird cars.
The trail starts at Wolfe Ranch, an old homestead site for the Wolfe family in the late 1800s (there’s a sign with more info about them at the beginning of the trail), and sets out across the salt flats.
About a half mile into the hike, the trail leaves the dirt and starts to climb rather steeply up a solid sandstone hill. It definitely got our hearts pumping and woke us up after an early rise. There are a few posts that mark the trail, but mostly you just follow the person in front of you until you aren’t going up anymore.
The steep hill ends at about 1.3 miles and the next section of the hike winds through canyons of sandstone dotted with a few pinyon pines.
After you’ve passed the trees, the trail leads up to a steep cliff, and you’ll pass a window arch that you can see Delicate through if you climb up to it. Once you’ve rounded the corner, you’ll enter a bowl where Delicate Arch stands at the opposite end.
The arch is 60 feet fall and quite the sight. It really does live up to its name. As soon as Cory saw it, he said “That thing is going down.”
We didn’t expect it to sit right at the edge of a bowl; the other side you normally don’t see in photos is a gradual, but still pretty steep drop off. We also didn’t realize was how angled the bowl is. Two people’s water bottles quickly slid down it!
There were more people than we were expecting based on the number of cars we saw, but everyone was great and we all had ample amount of time to wander around the arch and take photos without any photo bombs.
Delicate Arch’s orientation definitely lends itself better to sunset photos. While we enjoyed the low crowds at sunrise (and still good lighting conditions), the next time we do this hike will be at sunset!
