Arches National Park

4/20/09
I drove over to Arches under thick cloud cover, 40 mile-an-hour winds blowing up near dust bowl conditions. It was April 15 and I stopped in Hanksville to mail my tax return. The only other patron in the post office, here in a deep heart of anti-government sentiment, spoke of the coming revolution. It struck me that the federal government was the least of their problems, trying to ranch with no ground cover. Ranchers can’t blame the wind and they sure as hell won’t blame the cattle, so they blame whatever else is handy: wolves, wild horses, environmentalists, the federal government above all. I kept this admittedly cursory analysis to myself.

As I got closer to Arches the topsoil turned red and so of course did the dust. The storm clouds grew darker and dropped lower, turning the atmosphere an eerie deep orange. I pondered the situation: rain would have to fall through all of this dust and would inevitably turn to mud, no? The answer, quick in coming, was yes, it muds. Big thick brown drops painted my car in a lovely Mark Tobey-style, and I could kick myself for not taking a picture of it. But I had a more pressing concern. I had to get a campsite.

Arches NP has only one campground, Devil’s Garden, and it was a tough ticket. Half the sites required reservations, and people line up at the Visitors Center before 7:30 A.M. to vie for what few of the non-reserved sites might be opening up that day. I showed up in mid-afternoon and so had no chance at all. I was in the Visitors Center talking with a Ranger about my options and the camping situation in general - he said the park would be going to all reservation in 2010 - and believe it or not I must have made a good impression because at some point he offered to call the campground host to see if any one had pulled out because of the weather. Someone had - the wind had shredded their tent - so I ponied up my $20 and made the long drive up to the campground.

By the time I got to my site the rain had turned to snow, a sideways 25 mile an hour snow, and my car was no longer a work of art, just more of a mess than usual. I ate dinner at my picnic table then retreated to my car to wait out the snow. I figured it wouldn't last or accumulate and I was right. The early evening turned cold and clear and for the first time I could actually see the place. Again the storm lifted just before sunset, bringing some brief but gorgeous light. I somewhat regretted having signed up for just one night. The demand was so high you have to declare your intentions by 5:00 PM, and it was now 7:30. But at $20 and a ridiculous supply and demand situation, I left after one night and went to get a spot at one of many BLM campgrounds outside of Moab along the Colorado River. I would commute to the park.

I got a site on the river at Big Bend campground, a homely site right next to the campground host. You know you’re getting old when you set yourself up as close to authority as possible. $12, no water, except for Big Red running below me. The Colorado is a real river here, muddy and roiling, delivering its legendary sediment load not to the Colorado delta but to filling in Lake Powell. I was up on the bench of an old floodplain. The current floodplain below was rocky and waist high in twigs. The vegetation was scraggly, just barely budding. The ground around my site looked badly worn, burnt logs and burnt grass suggesting reckless campers. I later read that it was the work of the BLM, using fire to combat invasive tamarisk. 

Tamarisk Removal 

 
I felt a flush of euphoria as I got out my book to read in the sun above the river. Not much earlier I had been feeling despair. Funny how one can give way so quickly to the other - they ought to have a name for that. It had certainly become an increasing condition in my trip, and while I didn't think I was becoming more manic-depressive, I did notice that while it took very little to make me happy, I could become quite miserable when I was unable to get it for too long. What is that? Spoiled?

I was up early Saturday for a day of viewing the park’s most accessible arches: Sandstone Arch and Skyline Arch, Landscape, Pine Tree, Tunnel, Partition, Navajo, Double-O, and Private Arches. I made an effort to list them so I might identify them later in my photos, a goal that proved largely delusional. It was a lovely day and lots of people were out on the tour. The potential for wandering seemed fairly limitless, but I was content to stick with the crowds along the Devil’s Garden Trail, as the whole thing had begun to feel like a pilgrimage. A young woman expressed admiration for my speed and endurance, which she overstated but I still felt flattered. I finally had my white fluffy clouds against a blue cobalt sky.

Sandstone Arch

Navajo Arch

Landscape Arch is the most spectacular arch in the Devil’s Garden. It is 306 feet long, one of the longest arches in the world, and impossibly thin looking, in some places only 12 feet thick. It thinned considerably in the 1990s when hundreds of tons of rock spalled from the arch in a couple of different incidents. For safety reasons the park no longer allows hikers upslope for a closer view, so we viewed the arch in the context of its natural landscape, orange sand punctuated by pinon pine and scattered brush against a background of gleaming Entrada Sandstone walls. 

Landscape Arch

Landscape Arch, and all of the other arches in the park, are cut out of Entrada Sandstone, the dominant rock formation in Arches National Park. It looks nothing at all like the colorful soapy cathedrals of Kodachrome State Park‘s Entrada Sandstone. Here the Entrada looked more like it is supposed to: sheer, hard, cliff-forming. But with a few exceptions the cliffs aren’t enormous. They‘re small-scale in height and particularly in girth. What presumably were once huge cliffs have been eroded down, far more eroded than anything I’d yet seen on the Colorado Plateau. 5000 feet of earth had to erode before the Entrada Sandstone emerged into the light, and now most of it, too, has eroded.

The result of all this erosion is a landscape of narrow vertical rock walls known as fins, and these fins are the necessary condition in which alcoves erode into arches. If an alcove forms in a big thick wall of rock it will never make an arch - the weight of the rock above will collapse when the alcove gets too deep. (Raising the question: what is the deepest arch?) Fins are thin enough to accommodate an expanding hole in the middle without collapsing.

Future arch?

fins

Fins and arches occur in a member of Entrada Sandstone known as Slick Rock. Slick Rock lays above the Dewey Bridge member, a more crumbly mudstone. Some arches straddle the contact between Slick Rock and Dewey Bridge members, as the interface of porous sandstone and impermeable mudstone is a fine starting place for alcoves. The mudstone crumbles away and the weather eventually wears a hole through the upper fin, the beginnings of an arch.

Balanced Rock

One of the park’s more famous rock monuments, Balanced Rock, is not an arch but an enormous boulder of Slick Rock sandstone sitting atop a crumbling pile of Dewey Bridge mudstone.

Balanced Rock

I got a kick out of learning that while I was circumnavigating Balanced Rock I was walking on Navajo Sandstone. The huge cliffs of Zion, the towering domes of Capitol Reef, barely emerge from the ground here in Arches National Park. It‘s main exposure is a ground level field of mushroom swirls in an area called the Petrified Dunes. Some time in the distant future all of the Entrada Sandstone will weather away. Navajo Sandstone lies beneath awaiting its opportunity.
 
After about five hours on the trail I returned to the parking area which by mid-afternoon was simply packed. Arches is right off the highway and gets a lot of visitors. It is a small park with only so many paved places for people to drive to. There was no way I was getting one of the maybe three picnic tables the park had on offer, so I drove down to a turnout and went out on a rock promontory to eat and read. The views were extraordinary and my author was rambling a bit so I didn’t get much reading done. I love vistas and breezes and sunshine, at least in the spring. I also like quiet but was only getting small doses of that sitting 25 feet from the main road. Clouds coalesced like a forming storm only to break back up into fluffy clouds. It did look like it was raining over toward Green River. Improbably snowy mountains - the 12,000’ La Sal Range - provided the backdrop.

I went to the Visitors Center to sign up for a ranger walk the next morning into the Fiery Furnace, a dense maze of fins and canyons in which an inexperienced visitor like myself would very likely get lost. Many do. The walk cost $10; the park charges $4 for individuals going in on their own. The young ranger who signed me up said I reminded her of a less-angry Ed Abbey. I thought maybe I wouldn’t trim my beard after all.

Then off for an evening in the Windows Section, where for three hours I had a blast. North Window, South Window, Turret Arch, Double Arch, views out over the Colorado River to the La Sal Mountains. The evening people seemed more relaxed than the day people, moving slow, sitting around, chatting casually, waiting for the light. Three young men scrambled high into a deep alcove and began singing. Normally this would annoy me but they sounded pretty good and didn’t keep it going too long. I felt like applauding. A man and a young girl climbed to the top of Double Arch and provided a romantic scene. Great Day!

Turret Arch

Windows Arch

Double-Arch

Some time around midnight nearby campers broke out in bongo drums and chants. I strolled over to see if I might dissuade them but just as I got to their site a more militant camper drove his SUV up and shined his high beams right into their camp. I backed off as they shouted at one another. Otherwise I had a good night’s sleep with hardly any bursitis attacks.

Fiery Furnace

Up on Sunday morning to Fiery Furnace for my $10 ranger tour. Three hours and I was glad I went. I was struck mostly by the kids, a sub-species I had grown unfamiliar with. One small boy was having trouble at the trailhead, refusing a jacket, refusing sunscreen, and I’d have bet heavily he wouldn’t last long. He proved me wrong. The ranger repeatedly cautioned against walking on the little sand dunes, but a nine-year old boy had a hard time getting it. I had to sympathize with him: a long hike with nature talks but don’t step on some of the dirt? I was most impressed with a roughly 11-year-old girl who showed her stuff chimmey-ing, a technique for traversing slots so narrow at the bottom your feet can’t reach the ground. You have to extend your legs to walk along the lower wall while your hands balance higher up. She had the perfect long, lean frame for it and was obviously thrilled with her skills.

We were mostly out there to walk and to look, and the ranger's interpretive contributions were light. Fins are the key to arches, the ranger told us. I knew that. Fins are thin enough to erode through before they erode down, OK, that's good. Why does Entrada Sandstone erode into fins? That’s just the way it erodes. What does salt have to do with it? Something, but not so as to make much sense was the gist of our ranger’s explanation, and I thought it was a pretty good one for our crowd. He was more of a lizard guy.

After the ranger hike I retreated to my slick rock perch for lunch, but the day was much hotter and less breezy than the day before. It was too damn hot. I tried to find some shade but there was none to be had. It was only April. Summer here must be boiling. I finally found shade beneath a tree at a viewpoint parking lot, thankfully an unpopular one. Few came, fewer stayed, and on a day like this shade was shade.

Delicate Arch

Delicate Arch is one of the more well-worn icons in landscape photography and I might have skipped it except I was so close it would have been almost spiteful. It proved to be one of those "must sees" that actually exceeded my expectations. In fact it was great. I went late Sunday afternoon and the crowds were modest. The first half of the trail was broken landscape for sure, almost like an old quarry. The second half was quite beautiful, a worthwhile destination even without the arch, though its sudden emergence at the end of the trail was startling and glorious. Its setting was majestic and sublime, even with all the photographers hanging around waiting for sunset.

Delicate Arch is 45 feet high and spans 33 feet between abutments, but unlike any of the other arches it stands on its own, with no supporting walls. It stands alone on an expanse of slick rock that slopes first gently and then precariously down hill. It is all that remains of a fin, or for that matter of presumably any number of fins that once surrounded it. Now it opens to a broad landscape that includes the La Sal Range, as well as the colorful gypsum of Salt Wash below.

I explored Landscape Arch for a while and then wandered off to an attractive looking area I had spotted on my way in. Open expanses of smooth rock, filled with the wavy swirls of its sand dune past. I played photographer for a while, all along, not having to worry about what real photographers would think, as they were all back at Delicate Arch.

 I returned to Delicate Arch as the sunset approached, and by then the place looked like a stakeout for the latest disgraced celebrity. I didn’t need a great sunset picture and I still did need to get a campsite for the night, so I started back, passing a half dozen people racing desperately up trail to catch the money shot. Another great day. Two in a row. 

I recommend going to see Delicate Arch, while you can. Unlike most geological features, the arches at Arches aren't forever. Five known arches have fallen since 1971, my guidebook informed me, and Wall Arch, a significant arch along the Devil’s Garden trail, had come down since that book was published in 2007. The sign on the trail was still there, next to a pile of rubble. Spectacular features such as Balanced Rock, Landscape Arch, and Delicate Arch are the tail end of the erosional process. They could give way at any time. The park has some 2000 identified arches, but that includes any rock with a hole more than three feet wide. I’d have to think the number of spectacular arches is quite limited. They don't form as fast as they fall.

I got a campsite at Upper Big Bend, a half-mile from where I camped the night before (the bongo players were playing hacky-sack as I drove by). It was $8, no rippling river, bring your garbage back to Big Bend. The only problem was a young woman two sites down who talked loudly and endlessly until 11:30 when I wandered over and politely asked “them” to lower their voices (the two guys she was with had been barely audible). They said they were going to bed but of course now I couldn’t sleep. I was up for good at 6:30 and out to Fisher Towers where I ate breakfast with a spectacular view over the Colorado mesas. I decided not to hike there, and instead drove to Moab for food and then over to Islands in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park.