Devil's Garden Trail - March 2020

Summary

Devil’s Garden Trail is an exciting and challenging trail, in which you see a number of arches and varying terrain. We decided we would run this trail, given it fit into our running program and we had limited time in Arches. Just like our time on this trail, I will keep this debrief short.

Alltrails - this is the loop trail we followed, but we skipped the Dark Angel side route. Our hike ended up being about 6.5-7 miles in total. This trail is the second highest rated trail for Arches National Park.

Where

Devil’s Garden is located within Arches National Park in Utah. The closest town to this park is Moab.

Logistics

This trail was another part of our National Parks vacation. It was about a half hour drive from our base camp (Dead Horse Point State Park) to get into Arches National Park. Once in Arches, it took another 20-30 minutes to reach the trailhead. Arches is a busy park, even when we visited in early March. Parking is limited at this trailhead and we were lucky to have started running this trail mid-morning. By the time we finished, many people were circling the parking area to try to find an open space.

Hiking

Like I stated above, we decided to “run” this trail instead of hike. I threw quotations around run, because half of this trail, the primitive side, required scrambling, navigation, and a lot of focus. Thankfully we were not interested in our time on this run, but mostly interested in seeing this landscape from a different perspective.

The primitive side of this trail was very accurately defined by the information at the park. You really should know what you’re doing if you take this side of the loop, and we had a couple mistakes along the way ourselves. The nice part about this side of the loop is that there are far less hikers on the trail, given it’s ruggedness. So getting lost and finding a slot canyon to explore isn’t really the worst thing in the world!

Upon exiting out of the primitive area, we were rewarded with the Double O Arch. This arch was beautiful and by this point we transitioned from tight and tall rock structures to open views of the surrounding area. On our way back we were also able to check out Landscape Arch which is a long, thin arch in the distance.

All in all, running this trail was a unique experience. We got some looks from other hikers taking their time or struggling with the terrain, but for the most part people were pretty accommodating. I’m really happy we decided to run this trail, as it offered such a different perspective to exploration compared to what we normally do and see.

Photos

All photos on this trail run were taken with my Google Pixel 3.