Arches National Park 16 Nov

We awoke in our warm, cozy motel room and got up in comfort! After breakfast we went out to the cold van and started the short journey south to Arches National Park. There was snow on the ground in all the shaded parts and more incredible views through extraordinary red rock formations. We took a walk to try to climb on top of Skyline Arch which looked like quite a low arch from the road; only to find the climb impossible with the slippery snow on the rocks below it. Then a walk up to Landscape Arch took us through many shaded areas where the snow was lying quite deep and the desert shrubs and twisted trees looked glorious with their sprinkling of icing on top. Tristan collected enough snow to make a very solid palm sized snowball and to repay Celso for the couple of snowballs that had been lobbed in his direction!
It was so cold when we weren't in the sun and we finally made the decision to miss out on some of the places we had planned to see in Colorado and to whizz southwards to the sun. After a brief stop in Moab, which had an amazing variety of Kokapelli statues around its streets, we sped 100 miles south to a little town called Bliss that was about 2000ft lower in altitude and hopefully not sooooo cold! We arrived after a sunset that seemed to last for over an hour with the western sky glowing; I assume that it lasted so long as we came out from behind mountains.