Park Avenue Hike, all these huge rocks have rolled down the wash during flash floods
bubbasth1 (Premium member) > albums > Park Avenue Hike, Arches National P...
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The upper parking lot of the Park Avenue Hike is the first pull off and parking area on the left as you drive into the park.If one wants to fully understand how powerful the images seen on a Park Avenue hike are, you need to see it from both directions. This means a two way hike.. Now; how do we make it the most enjoyable. We know the hike is only about a mile or a little more long. However, it travels on a continuous slope all the way, and the steepest is the stairs at the top of the trail. Option one is to somehow have one person park your vehicle at the bottom,and wait till they can walk back up the road, or up the trail, or hitch a ride from the bottom parking to the top and hike back down the trail. I am going to suggest another angle of attack. My wife and I are both 66 years young and we don't do much hiking when we are home but we walk a fair bit.. We discovered the best way to see Park Avenue the first time she saw it would be for her to start at the top while I drove to the bottom and hiked back up the trail where I could meet her about a quarter of the way down and we would both head back down the trail to the car. I have hiked this trail many times so I thought this would work and it did. The only problem was that when we were coming down we were spending a lot of time turning around and trying to get photos looking back up the trail.. Then it dawned on us, (remember our age), why spend all that time turning around and make it easy by doing a two way hike. OK, so we've made our decision, how do we implement it to maximize our effort.. I remembered a year earlier when I was hiking down Park Avenue from the top to the bottom(I had a person with me that didn't want to do the hike that day), take the vehicle to the bottom parking area and I would join them there. I don't remember how much of an incline the hike was from top to bottom, but I knew for sure it was easier going down than up. As I hiked down I came across two older folks in their late 70's coming up the trail at about a quarter of the way up. We chatted for a few minutes and I asked if they were going one way. They were huffing and puffing a bit and said no, they were just doing the one way. I suggested that if they were going to do it again that it might be easier to park at the top and walk DOWN the trail and they might enjoy it more. They thanked me for the advice and said they would do that.. SO...WE start at the bottom and walk up the hike, including the stairs to the trailhead, sit and relax for ten or fifteen minutes, have a drink and a nibble of something, then wander back down. It was wonderful. We had used our leg muscles to climb the top one quarter of the trail including the stairs that took the most energy, and used the slope to leave the second half of the hike moving easily down the trail back to our vehicle. Isn't gravity cool.... Park Avenue is a short hike that shouldn't be missed by anyone.
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