Arches National Park - Devils Garden

About six months ago we booked the only night we could find in Arches National Park. The campground is in the Devils Garden area, deep into the park (about 18 miles from the entrance).

Broken Arch

While we love and generally prefer dispersed camping (aka boondocking) we are enjoying camping inside the parks. It opens up early morning and late evening hiking opportunities that might otherwise be missed.

We have enough experience with Arches to know that you arrive for entry early in the morning if you don’t want to wait in line (sometimes for more than an hour). So we bolted out of Dead Horse Point at about 6am and made it through the entrance at about 6:40am. We were surprised to even see a ranger at the entry to check our pass. This might be related to the timed entry reservaton pilot they are doing this year. Having a campground reservation excluded us from needing a timed entry.

Hiking Devils Garden

Our parking spot for coffee and breakfast was at the Devils Garden trailhead. We hiked the full loop without some of the spurs, a challenging hike that we first did back in 2018.

Julie hiking a fin

We went out on the primitive trail, named such because there’s more and deeper sand, the trail has fewer markings, and there might be some more rock scrambling. I say might because the main trail has a decent amount of rocky ups and downs. The main trail also has more walking along narrow fins with deep descents off both sides. This is an amazing hike!

Our campsite in Arches

Our campsite was just a pulloff from the main road in the campground, but setting was spectacular. We did a late evening hike to Tapestry Arch and Broken Arch directly from the campground (photo at the top).