2012/06 Western USA trip - Arches |
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Tuesday June 12th
When we headed into Arches in the morning; it was already a hot day. But first we wanted to stop at the overlooks from the entrance road. 
The distant peaks were part of the La Sal range (salt). The buttes in front of us were named for their resemblance to the ironclads of the Civil War, the Monitor and Merrimac. The lizard in the picture didn’t care about any of that.
Arches was just as busy as the previous evening. We drove past some spectacular scenery, following our usual plan of driving to the far end of the road and working our way back. Lots of others had the same plan, and the Devil’s Garden parking area was full; we had to pretend to be picnicking in
order to park. The parking area is a big ring around what used to be the campground. The park service is trying to restore the circle to a natural state but it’s 
all being trampled by hikers heading for the trail head so they might as well turn it into a much larger and safer parking lot.
There are over a thousand arches inside the park, formed because the sandstone rock was laid down over a massive deposit of salt, visible as green dunes in some places. The sandstone erodes to fins and then to arches. And they are still eroding; dozens of arches have collapsed in recent years. We opted to take the trail to Landscape Arch, the biggest in the park at nearly a hundred yards long. When we got there we found that even that arch had shed a few hundred tons of rock over the last twenty years and we weren’t allowed to walk underneath. 
Sandie was getting sunburnt but the rest of us risked hiking to another couple of nearby arches.
We drove back to the Salt Valley overlook and then to the Delicate Arch area. This arch is perhaps the most famous in Utah, but no one felt like hiking out to it; we walked a less demanding trail to view it from afar. We also found this prairie dog who enjoyed a burrow along the trail (and maybe too much junk food).
We drove to the Windows section of the park, with its trails to yet more windows and arches. No one seemed anxious to hike any 
more trails so I set off alone, with a busload of Japanese in close pursuit. I sprinted to stay ahead of the crowd and took my pictures before the skyline got too crowded.
Closer to the exit, we stopped at Courthouse and then Wall Street, not arches but just amazing giant fins of glowing red sandstone. This scenery alone would be enough to create a park, but here it’s just an add-on as it doesn’t include any arches. Still amazing stuff
We left the park and drove into Moab for some shopping and some fuel and to mail a pile of postcards. We made our way back to the Horsethief campground only to find that there was a chain across our section of the campground, with the explanation that it was closed in summer. We unhooked the chain as we’d already paid for that night but realized that we needed to move the next morning.