Mon 6/6 - Exhaustion 1 : Ambition 0

Pictures will be added to this post when I get chance to download them.

     This morning started off with another crepe breakfast courtesy of the leftover batter from the batch Dave made yesterday.  Our primary plan for the day was to tackle Dragonfly canyon, but that only takes about 3 hours.  Since the forecast for the day was 105 degrees (which was indeed an accurate forecast) and since Dragonfly is a wet, shady canyon that involves swimming and wading, we decided to do some hiking in Arches National Park in the morning before it got too hot.  Today is Brads last full day in Moab since he will leave the morning after we get back from rafting, and he missed Arches last time as well.  We spent the morning sorting gear and get everything ready for both the hike and the canyon trip. 
     We were supposed to visit the river outfitters office for an orientation tonight, but were concerned that we might not make it back in time.  We called and found out that we could stop by anytime, so we headed over there and picked up our dry bags and met our guide.  Afterwards we had to run back to the house to drop everything off since our trunk was already full and everybody has to carry the new gear on their laps.  While good to get out of the way, this did get us off to a later start than planned.
     One of the best hikes in Arches is the Devils Garden trail, so we headed there.  Brad has missed Arches on his last visit to Moab, and this will be his last full day in Moab since he will be flying home the day after we return from our Whitewater Trip.  Once we did a couple of laps of the parking lot and finally managed to snag a spot, we headed up the trail.  Devils Garden is an out and back trail over rugged terrain but is pretty well graded until it reaches Landscape Arch, which is one of the most famous in the park.  Beyond that, the trail gets much tougher and the crowd thins out considerably.  Last time I visited Arches we went quite a distance past the trail.  Dave has been here before several times, and also never quote went all the way.  Once we reached that point, we all wanted to keep going to see a section of the park that we had not visited before.  We made it all the way to the "Dark Angel" formation, which is the absolute end of the trail.
     By now, it was starting to get uncomfortably hot.  I also found that my 3-liter Camelbak has run out of water and only had some ice remaining.  The return trip was much less pleasant than the return trip due the the heat and lack of water.  Everybody was out of water by the time we reached the car, and were all extremely exhausted.  It was already past 3:00, so we decided to head back to the house to shower and rest.  Dragonfly canyon will have to wait until a later date, so unfortunately Brad is going to miss it again.
     Once we were all cleaned up and refreshed we considered making another attempt at climbing Wall St. with copious amounts of bug spray applied.  Since we had lots of packing and prep to do for tomorrow we decided to skip it. We were not quite ready for dinner yet, so we managed to finish the remainder of yesterdays game of Terra Mystica.  I'm not sure yet, but I think we might just make a gamer out of Dave yet. 
     Afterwards, we chose to go to the Broken Oar restaurant for dinner.  I had eaten there in 2007 and enjoyed it, so tried to revisit on our trip in 2011 but found it was permanently closed.  I was therefore surprised to drive by it the other day and notice it was reopened.  While a bit expensive, the food was good.  Perhaps the most amazing thing about trip was that we have not actually had a bad meal yet, which is a pretty significant achievement while in Moab.
     The evening was spent packing, which took quite a bit longer than anybody has anticipated.  Cramming everything yesterday into overly small dry bags is a challenge.  We are also checking out of the rental house tomorrow, so everything that is not going on the river also needed to be packed up and loaded into the cars.  Thankfully, we got a call from the River Outfitter who realized that had not told us the check in time.  We thought it was 7:00am since that was on the paperwork, but were happy to hear that it was actually 10:00am. 
     We will be out of touch for the next 5 days until we return.