5 Reasons to Visit Moab in July

This month’s featured guest blogger is Claire Richmond, of Clairified Design and Hello and High Five! After taking an amazing trip to Moab this summer, she’s sharing five reasons you should visit Moab in July.

I recently returned from a whole week exploring the mountains and deserts of beautiful Utah with my boyfriend, Michael. We found a fantastic deal on a Frontier flight from Des Moines that got us into Salt Lake City on a Monday evening in July.

After spending time visiting family, hiking high altitudes that ended in snowball fights and crystal clear lakes teeming with salamanders, we hit the road heading south to the Moab desert on Thursday morning.

This might be the point you stop reading and wonder why in the world we would go down to the desert at the hottest point of the year. I can assure you, we had that same initial thought.

There were a number of reasons why we incorporated a desert excursion into our Utah vacation in July, and I promise none of them have to do with climate in Moab being a “dry heat.” Here are five.

Book a bed and breakfast in a central location in Moab.

Michael and I stayed two nights at the LaunchPad owned and operated by Erin Greenley, a former resident of Fairfield Iowa, which makes her an Iowanderer in her own right. Erin loves discovering new mountain biking trails, she named the LaunchPad after a place she saw on one of her maps.

Erin calls The LaunchPad a “bed and bagel,” because she learned soon after opening that no one had time to eat a big breakfast before starting that day’s adventure, particularly when you’re trying to get several miles of hiking before it breaks 90 degrees!

At the Launch Pad, guests use the kitchen to make their own bagel breakfasts before they heading out for a day of exploring the desert.

We found the LaunchPad to be the perfect, centrally located place for our Moab adventure. Plus, Erin has complimentary bicycles available to rent so you can choose to see Moab by foot, car or on two wheels. I recommend biking to the downtown area, where you can wander in art galleries, restaurants, bookshops, and boutiques.

We stayed in one the bed and bagel’s five guest rooms, called the Westwater. The Westwater provided all the comforts of home, including a private full bathroom stocked with shampoo and conditioner, and our little kitchen area with coffee maker and min-fridge.

The common areas are bright and open, full of plants and guarded by two little kitties named Kokachin and Mei Lin.

Watch the sunset at Dead Horse Point State Park.

This is the state park you don’t want to miss, it’s Moab’s grand canyon and nothing short of spectacular. We pulled into Moab late Thursday afternoon, and as soon as we dropped our bags at the Launch Pad, we made our way to Dead Horse Point State Park.

Dead Horse is about a 35-minute drive from Moab, punctuated by red rock buttes and crazy walls of colorful sediment lines. The park is named from one local legend, which says the point was used as a corral for wild mustangs roaming the mesa top.

One particular day, cowboys herded a large group of horses across the 30-yards wide neck of land and onto the point, which was surrounded on all sides by cliffs with steep drop offs. Once horses were chosen, cowboys left the others corralled on the waterless point, where they died of thirst.

Whether you chose to believe in the grim tale or not, won’t impact your ability to enjoy the views, the colors, and the sunset. Plus, you have free range to crawl all over rocks and get as near to the edge of the cliffs as you dare.

If you go at sunset, do remember this pro tip: take insect repellent. It got super buggy at dusk, and we initially tolerated the swatting, buzzing and occasional bite, until the bats came out to eat the bugs! After Michael had two dive bomb his head simultaneously, we called it a night.

Raft the Colorado River.

On Friday afternoon after a morning climbing on red rock formations at Arches National Park, Michael and I put on life vests. The sun was high and temperatures were climbing, so it was the perfect time for a rafting trip down the Colorado River.

The canyons around Moab are full of white water trails and places to raft. We were short on time so we opted for a afternoon half-day to Fishers Towers, which provided a little bit of rapids, a little bit of swimming, and a picnic lunch.

The water was mostly calm on our stretch of river, so we slid off the back of our raft and spent most of the afternoon floating along, enjoying a whole new view of rock formations in the canyons.

I recommend the half-day trip with Adrift Adventures, especially if you don’t have time for an overnight excursion. It’s still long enough to get the gist of the rafting experience and fall in love with being on the river.

Michael and I are already discussing when we’ll come back for the multi-day 120-mile rafting trip through Cataract Canyon!

Night hike the double arch.

I recommend packing a headlamp so you can go deep into Arches National Park at night. We spent the evening surveying the park and decided the Double Arch was our favorite trail, so we headed that way after sunset.

We put on our headlamps, hiked out and up into the arch, found some flat rocks to sit against, then turned off our lights and looked up.

This was seriously the moment I was looking forward to the most from our trip, and we weren’t let down. I don’t know how long we sat there speculating constellations in hushed whispers, amidst the slow motion photographers.

There’s truly nothing like the clear desert sky on a summer night.

Find dino tracks.

The canyons surrounding Moab are full of pre-historic archeological treasures! In fact, you can find small, sometimes unmarked, trails right off the highway that will lead you to petroglyphs and fossilized dinosaur tracks.

We used Google maps before we left so that each of the places we wanted to see were on our phones, despite being so far off the grid.

Finding dino tracks and cave art were the last on our list of things to see before heading back up to Moab. It took us almost an hour and a half on Saturday morning to see both the birthing scene petroglyphs and the Potash Road dinosaur tracks, because they are on opposite sides of the Colorado River.

We started with the birthing scene, which we found off the shoulder of the highway near the water, on a large boulder.

Then we were off to see the dinosaur tracks! This time, there was a parking lot near a trail head that took us near the tracks, but we definitely wouldn’t have found them without a volunteer parks guide, who was also a paleontology student.

I learned more than my little brain could ever remember about the dinosaurs that roamed what is now the Moab desert, and how their footprints became fossils.

I can safely say that a trip to Moab is worth a trip even if you go in the heat of summer. Maximize your park time by getting your hikes in super early in the day and around sunset.

I recommend packing breakfast for the road and eat at the trailhead, then during the heat of the day plan for air conditioning downtown restaurants and breweries, or take a dip in a local swimming hole. If you do stop for coffee or breakfast, one spot you simply cannot miss is the Ekleticafe.