You know how it feels when you witness something so astonishingly exquisite and surreal it literally takes your breath away, and all you can do is gasp in amazement?

This was my reaction last week upon entering Utah’s Arches National Park, a sprawling, red-rock landscape festooned with more than 2,000 natural stone arches, towering pinnacles and precariously balanced boulders that evoke the surface of Mars more closely than that of Planet Earth.

My wife, Lisa, and I stood in silent awe and instinctively reached for cameras, while our son, Tom, making his third visit to the park, patiently indulged us with unspoken knowledge borrowed from the old Broadway promise: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

He was right.

During nearly a week of clambering over trails in Arches and Canyonlands national parks that took us to – in some cases through – graceful arches, as well as overlooking the rims of yawning chasms and among groves of juniper, pinyon pine, box elder, cottonwood and aspen scattered amid high desert and fields of sage, we found ourselves repeatedly marveling, “It can’t get any better.” But it did.

With so many choices in and around Moab we tried to cover the highlights, which included hikes ranging from less than a mile to more than 5 miles over occasionally challenging terrain to some of Utah’s most celebrated rock formations:

– Landscape, Partition and Double O arches in the Devils Garden section of Arches National Park.

– Double, Turret, North Window and South Window arches a few miles south of Devils Garden.

– Mesa Arch and Dead Horse Point State Park in the Island in the Sky section of Canyonlands, where the car-driving-off-the-cliff scene in “Thelma and Louise” was filmed.

– The 243-foot-long Morning Glory Arch/Natural Bridge, the sixth-longest in America, located on Bureau of Land Management property near Moab.

Tom and I also detoured for a 14-mile paddle that included several sporting rapids down the nearby Colorado River, which I’ll write about next week.

Lisa and I had flown from Connecticut to Salt Lake City while Tom took a bus from Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where he has been working as a kayak guide, and then the three of us drove a rental car 230 miles southeast to our base in Moab, an adventure hub popular among hikers, climbers, mountain bikers, paddlers and rafters.

It was a happy family reunion and an opportunity to add new adventures to the long list of mountain expeditions, kayak voyages and marathon runs we’ve shared over the decades.

“We’ve covered a lot of ground together,” Tom noted.

“And a lot of water,” I added.

Moab offers extensive resources for all sorts of activities. You can rent rafts, kayaks and bikes; take guided tours or strike out on your own. In mid-October the town was hopping, with most of the hotels, motels and campgrounds posting “No Vacancy” signs, and long waits at many of the popular restaurants. We had booked our accommodations months in advance and cooked nearly all our own meals there.

Because 2016 is the 100th anniversary of the national park system all are experiencing record crowds this year – a double-edged sword. It’s gratifying that so many people appreciate parks and want to visit, yet daunting when considering the impact.

Viewing all the traffic (to which we contributed) I thought about Edward Abbey, whose 1968 autobiographical work, “Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness,” based on the year he spent at Arches in the 1950s as a seasonal ranger for the National Park Service, is recognized as a seminal inspiration for the environmental movement.

He wrote, “I am almost prepared to believe that this sweet virginal primitive land would be grateful for my departure and the absence of the tourist, will breathe metaphorically a collective sigh of relief – like a whisper of wind – when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy, anxious, brooding consciousness of man…

"Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhuman spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I want to know it all, possess it all, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally … No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread."