After a couple more hours at Disneyland, we got on the road for a grueling drive through the Mojave to Moab, UT, to see Arches National Park.
Along the way we passed by Barstow, CA, the site of the National Training Center, and Victorville, the site of the DARPA robotic car Urban Challenge. We also had a chance to overdose on chili dogs at Weinerschnitzel, one of our favorite fast food restaurants when we lived in Texas.
Despite a very late arrival in Moab, we get started bright and early at Arches National Park. This was the first stop on this Summer’s trip where we had a lot of heat.
The famous arches of this park are formed by snow and rain eroding the sandstone of the mountains and hills. Over time, “fins” are formed in the mountains. The fins often erode to from arches, and then over time the arch becomes so thin that it collapses. The park offered several opportunities for short hikes (1 to 3 miles) as well as longer, more-serious hikes. Due to the heat, we only took the short hikes.
One of our first stops was the trailhead for a short hike through the “Park Avenue” formations. They have this name, because the series of rock formations look a little like a city skyline. This one looked to me a little like an Easter Island head.
This was a one-way hike. Candy dropped off Tommy, Sam, and me and then drove to the other end of the hike to pick us up.
One of the more famous formations in Arches is the Balanced Rock. You can walk pretty close to this formation, but there are signs everywhere to stay on marked paths. What looks like just sand and gravel is covered by a microscopic “biocrust” that is damaged by footsteps but is essential to minimize soil erosion and as part of the food chain in the region.
We took at short walk to see the North and South Window arches. Not far away are two more arches, called the Turret Arch. A disappointing aspect of this park was the huge number of people. It’s not too obvious from this picture, because I waited until the crowds had passed to snap the shot, but everywhere we went, we were fighting crowds. We did take the “primitive trail” around the back side of these two arches. That might have been the only time all day that we weren’t in a big crowd. The people in this picture help provide some sense of scale for the size of these arches.
After a picnic lunch we took a short hike to the observation point to see the famous “Delicate Arch,” the unofficial state symbol for Utah. The walk was hot and dusty. The arch itself was a bit of a disappointment. While impressive, unless you want to take a six-mile hike to its base, you cannot get very close.
I think what makes Delicate Arch interesting is that it seems to be standing all alone. The other arches are still part of massive fins.
While driving to see the Landscape Arch, we passed Skyline Arch, which might have been the most picturesque one we saw all day.
Landscape Arch (toward the left of this shot) has an interesting story. The arch stretches over 100 yards across. In 1971, when tourists were allowed to walk up to and under this arch, tourists heard cracking sounds and pebbles began to fall. The cracking provided warning for the tourists to flee just before 180 tons of rock fell from the underside of this arch. This is as close as you can get now. At its thinnest, Landscape Arch is around six feet thick now, and it’s unclear how long it will remain an arch.
About 1600 we got back in the car and headed to Colorado to position ourselves for touring Rocky Mountain National Park the next day.