Moab

The restaurants in Moab have fans that blow cold water over you while you eat. It keeps you cool, and it is fair warning about the desert outside. The town is small, about 5,000 people in a valley on the Colorado Plateau, a few low blocks either side of Main Street, with outfitters and bike shops where another town would have resorts. Red sandstone cliffs hem it in. Beyond them is what people actually come for, the rock and the river.

The park gate is about four miles north of town, and Arches beyond it looks like a stage set nobody remembered to take down: fins and towers of red rock, and stone windows with the sky showing through. Delicate Arch is three miles there and back. We walked out for the sunset with a fair crowd who had the same idea, and watched the arch go from orange to black against a sky streaked with pink. The next day was Canyonlands, under a lid of grey cloud: Mesa Arch and the drop beyond it, and a dirt road zigzagging down a canyon wall that people, apparently, drive on.

We also walked up the Colorado River in Moab, and the scenery was out of this world, which round here is close to a plain description. The town is built for getting out into it: there are jeep tours over the slickrock east of town, and half-day rafting trips between the canyon walls along Highway 128. We did not go off-roading, but the people going round in ATVs looked like a lot of fun.

North of town, toward Arches is where we slept, in a tent seven miles out on US 191, with Arches twelve minutes up the road and Island in the Sky twenty-five. We liked it a great deal, and the tent was very comfortable and never once felt like camping. The camp has no café. We cooked on its shared barbecue and ate under the stars with a beer, while the fire in the pit outside the tent burned down and a marshmallow or two went black on a stick. The rest of our meals were in Downtown Moab, seven miles back down the road, under the fans.

We went in mid-June, as the spring season ends; it starts in late April, and early September to mid-October is the other good stretch. July and August are the months to miss, with highs regularly past 100°F (38°C) and the trailhead car parks at Arches full before eight in the morning. The fans in town have their work cut out then.