This past weekend, Sindhu, Rucha and I visited our friend Omkar in Salt Lake City, Utah. In my opinion, this was one of the best weekends of the past year, and I’m about to tell you about why.
Visiting a close friend you haven’t seen or spent time with in a long time is always heartwarming, and I feel like we couldn’t have had a better group of people on this trip.
We drove from Salt Lake City (SLC) to Moab, Utah a couple hours after landing in SLC on Friday afternoon. I should start by saying SLC is a lovely city, with a beautiful mountainous backdrop. The mountains had snowy caps since it’s currently fall, and look beautiful at all hours of the day. After grabbing some quick Chipotle burrito bowls and Pretty Bird chicken sandwiches (lol), we headed along the way southeast to Moab. I drove the latter couple of hours, and even though we were in pitch darkness for most of that point, the experience was so pleasant. There’s pretty much nothing more relaxing than fast driving with fun tunes and mountain outlines along the journey.
Arriving at Hampton Inn in Moab approximately 4–5 hours or so after leaving Salt Lake City, we quickly freshened up, made a plan for the following morning, strategized on a Sudoku game in the local newspaper, and fell asleep.
Our plan was to wake up and get ready by 6 am or so, grab a quick breakfast of waffles (arguably the star of the trip if you ask Rucha) and other goodies at Hampton Inn’s complimentary breakfast selection, and then head to Arches National Park around 7 am or so on Saturday.
As my job has taught me: planning is important but plans are useless. Writing stuff down definitely kept us accountable and helped us wake up at a reasonable time.. but we ran a bit behind schedule which was totally fine :)
If I remember correctly, we got to Arches by around 7:30/8 am, and drove over to the Delicate Arch trailhead. The parking lot was almost full at this time, which was slightly surprising. We quickly scarfed down a few energy bars and chocolates, and started the hike. This was a relatively simple 1.6mi (one way) hike, and we took a couple of water/de-layering/liquid IV breaks along the way up. Getting to the top of Delicate Arch area was absolutely incredible. The views from up there are beautiful, and Delicate Arch was even larger and taller than I remembered from the last time I visited Arches National Park, about 10–11 years ago. We had a fun little photoshoot up there, admired a cute baby, and soaked in all the sweeping views. One of my favorite things about hiking is that everyone is universally in a lovely mood. If you ask me, it’s kind of impossible to be in a bad mood on a hike. All the other hikers around us were smiling when crossing our paths, sharing stories & laughs, and joking amongst each other — much like the four of us. I couldn’t ask for a better way to spend a Saturday morning.
After enjoying the views for a while, we headed on our way back down and drove around the rest of Arches. We also did a small stop at Landscape Arch, and walked around a bit. At this point, we grabbed a quick pizza lunch back in Moab thinking we’d come back to Arches to explore more but unfortunately the park reached max visitor capacity.
Instead of heading back to Salt Lake City immediately, we decide to visit Canyonlands National Park for a quick hour. I’ve been here before, and knew everyone would appreciate the views. It’s really freeing to drive up in a land 6,000 feet in elevation and overlook deep, vast canyons on both sides of the narrow road. Canyonlands provided the best views in my opinion, and also an immense sense of mental clarity. When you’re staring down into an abyss of 6K+ feet, all your personal problems seem trivial and nonexistent. The layered rock formations and wind-related weather effects were also super interesting to read about during the various viewpoints we stopped at.
After frolicking at Canyonlands for an hour, we headed back to SLC, grabbed a warm, satisfying ramen dinner, and passed out shortly afterward.
The next morning, we drove over to the Bonneville Slat Flats, which are located approximately 1.5 hours drive west of SLC very close to the Utah/Nevada border. This was most exciting for me since I was really curious for what these would look like and because it was a new destination that I hadn’t seen or heard about before. We even saw some of the Morton salt factories and processing centers on the way. The Slat Flats are amazing because they’re so unsurprisingly flat, and reflective since it had rained right before we arrived. This results in a very symmetrical, white, shiny view. It felt like we visited another planet, and I would love to spend more time walking around there and really capturing the essence of the surroundings. These Salt Flats contain 147+ million tons of salt embedded in the ground, which drives the majority of our country’s salt production.
We also explored a couple of funny destinations in Nevada near the border, but that’s a discussion for another time. I drove the way back to SLC from Salt Flats which was again so blissful and pleasant. The driving during this trip was one of my favorite parts. It’s so calming to drive while observing beautiful nature in every which direction (and very fun to occasionally speed at 120+ mph on straight, Utah freeways). It was almost sunset, and we watched the sun slowly descend behind the clouds and eventually shine through and illuminate certain mountain caps and towns in a golden aura.
After successfully arriving back at SLC, we grabbed dinner, enjoyed a few tasting glasses of whiskeys and wines, and made our way to the airport for our respective flights home.
I want to spend many more weekends like this, because I haven’t experienced this level of content and calmness in such a long time. I guess spending time in nature has this effect on people. Work has been rather taxing lately, and this was such a perfect long weekend getaway. It’s really eye-opening how much beautiful nature there is in the mid/west USA and I feel like I’m just barely scratching the surface in terms of exploration.
Thanks for reading, and if you’re thinking of visiting Utah anytime soon, you can hopefully tell by now that I have tons of thoughts and recommendations :)
