Page 3 of 12
Arches National Park, Utah
You can’t keep safe what wants to break
There is more to Arches National Park than Delicate Arch. All over the place a right combination of geological conditions- a 300 million year old unstable salt bed from an ancient sea, rock formed over time in layers on top that has started to break away- have created a temporary wonderland. If you had set up a time lapse camera, say, a few million years ago, you could watch the playback of arches forming, becoming more dramatic and then breaking apart into ruin. Even today the process is continuing, slow to us but lighting fast in geological terms. All over the park you can see future dramatic arches and others that are already on their way out.
Meanwhile all those tiny, distant people lurking underneath the North Window don't seem all that concerned about all those dangerous geological forces that ever so slowly continue to carefully plot right over their heads.
Now if I was naming this formation I'd probably go with Mirror Arches or Twin Arches, but instead they were named The Spectacles (which I guess I can see if you imagine that big rock in the center to be a giant, disfigured nose). Individually the one on the right is South Window and the one on the left is North Window.
A close up, early morning view of Double Arch, yet another well named rock formation in the park. In general the light for most of the arches is better in the low light of the early morning or late afternoon, with early morning being preferable due to the cool (or in some cases cold) temperatures. I was lucky during my visit to avoid the 100 degree plus days that can plague that part of Utah that time of year- even in the genial mid 80s I was often fairly hot and (with the incredibly low humidity) always feeling dehydrated regardless how much water I drank.
Maybe Landscape Arch should be renamed Delicate Arch. It's long (the world's longest at almost 300 feet) but tenuously narrow at only 6 feet deep in places. Rain (it does rain in the desert) and the freeze/thaw cycle do not encourage stability and Landscape Arch is the best (or worst) case example of that. In 1991 and again in 1995, huge chunks of rock (70 foot long by 5 foot deep) came crashing down underneath the arch, making its structural span slightly more dramatic and forcing the closure of the trails directly underneath it. Of all the arches in the park, this one looks to be the next to go- even the snarky park rangers like to say that you should visit this one today because it might not be there tomorrow.
There is more to Arches National Park than just arches, although the arches are unquestionably the reason to go. A few interesting rock formations dot the sweeping desert landscape to try and distract you from all the geological acrobatics elsewhere. The greatest concentration of these formations are in an area called Park Avenue, an easy to reach canyon with a wonderfully accessible trail that starts at an overlook (see first picture) and winds between formations all the way down to the Courthouse Rocks (see second picture). Most of the hiking trails are reasonably easy at Arches, although all were so well marked and so well traveled that you rarely had that isolated, back country feel that you get in so many other US national parks.
