It was a fun little stop for cooped up kids in the car. The details on the trail weren’t quite what I expected, but I’ve never done any part of the Oregon/California trail before. Nothin g beats free adventure on a road trip!
Beautiful park with lots of visual highlights in the vast landscape. There is an easy nature trail that loops around the visitors center. Has a nice rock wall built so you can look down the canyon walls without feeling like you (or the kids) are going to fall off. More vegetation than I expected, bring binoculars if you plan to look for wildlife among the ledges.
Beautiful area - we did Island in the sky district and the east rim hike - easy for the kids, nothing too scary close to the edges, gorgeous pictures every time we stopped. Lots of lizards for the kids to watch as we hiked around. Do your research and make sure which area of the park you want to see, it's several hours drive between each of the 3 districts and would take some serious planning to try and hit all 3 in the same day. We were able to do Dead Horse Point state park and Island in the sky in one day with ease.
Short hike to a beautiful arch, VERY busy area, absolutely worth it.
Well built little cabins (2) but you can't go inside them, the larger one has a window you can look through but it only has a wooden picnic table in it so, not much history there. The small dirt floor cabin is all roped off with no windows but it doesn't appear that there is anything inside it either. Nice short hike to the Petroglyph site which was fun to visit with the kids.
We stuck to the "easy" trails with our kids and we all loved it. The gnats were pretty intense on some of the trails when you stopped moving, but as long as your in motion things were good, there was a nice gentle breeze for our hikes that helped a ton. Lots of wildlife, lizards everywhere. I think we missed the great sand box at Devil's garden everyone mentioned, but we still were able to find a nice area of soft sand in the shade for the kids to play in before we headed back down. The arches are incredible and we loved watching for them everywhere we went in the park. Incredible landscapes! Don't forget to check the park out at sunset/night time - some areas were even more beautiful with the sunset colors!!
Great pit stop to stretch your legs. The kids did great (3, 10) even though they really didn't care about the history of it. We tried to tell them stories about why "Doc" was so infamous, which helped a little. Really fascinating to see the life span of some 100 years ago - we found one individual who lived to be 90!