Mesa Arch Trail is probably the most popular hiking trail in Canyonlands National Park. It is a 0.7 miles long loop trail just South of Island in the Sky visitor center of Canyonlands National Park. Although the trail is super popular, the parking lot for this is quite small and can probably only hold 20 cars. Thus people often had to park the car on the side of the road due to the amount of crowd on this trail.
Instead of visiting Mesa Arch during the day, we decided to go there for sunrise. We work up at 4AM in the morning and got to Mesa Arch parking lot around 5:30AM. When we got there, we were shocked with what we saw. The parking lot was essentially full. We were lucky to get the last parking space. We were surprised by the amount of people here this early in the morning.
As we made our way on the trail to Mesa Arch, there were so many people there already. Almost everyone had their tripod and camera set up and just waiting for the sun to rise above the horizon. We weren't able to find a good spot to take any good photo. We simply came too late.
Just as we were thinking of what to do, one young lady moved away from her front row seat and told us we could sit there. We couldn't believe a person this nice existed! Her spot was a perfect spot to take the photo of Mesa Arch with sunrise. This has allowed us to take many magnificent photos of Mesa Arch during sunrise.
When the sun rose above the mountain, the Mesa Arch started to have this beautiful orange grow. It was simply beautiful. For those 10 minutes of sunrise, all we could hear was the camera timer ticking and shutter sound. Everyone was taking photo after photo nonstop.
As we finished taking photo, we also walked around the area. There were higher grounds above Mesa Arch where people can have a better view of the sunrise. That is only if you don't want to take photos with Mesa Arch.
As we head back to the parking lot, there was still a lot of people there taking photos. This was the first time that we ran into so many people during sunrise.
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