Morning Meal

Morning Meal. I approached a fork in the trail with dawn to my right and had to choose between left or right. I chose to stay down and away from the light a little longer and went left. This led me to pine tree arch. The arch is gouged out of the right side of a narrow corridor between two sandstone fins. The arch opens up to a downward sloping field of sand and low scrub flanked by walls of stone.

I sat in the sand at the top of the scrub field between the two stone ridges with the rising sun casting the shadow of pinetree arch onto the wall behind me. The first thing that I began to notice was that there was no wind and with no wind the scrubs weren't chattering and the loose sand wasn't rolling along the foot of the stone. I watched swirling clouds of mosquitoes rising from the scrub to look for a mate as my ears grew accustomed to this aural stillness. Then a new sound cut through my deafness, a slicing of the still air and a ruffle of feathers. The first of it was barely audible and as I turned to look for the bird, another slid through the air right above my head. The only sound produced was that of the Western Meadowlark's slender shape shearing the still air as it glided through the circling column of mosquitoes. There was then a rippling sound as the bird flapped his wings to circle a boulder at the edge of the field and dove through the mosquitoes once more. Soon there were three birds sweeping back and forth, three feet from the ground. If I was quick I could have grabbed one from where I sat.

As I sat watching the birds have their morning meal I became aware of some reddish ants toiling near my feet. Soon, I could hear them too; tossing sand as they scrambled over pebbles. I almost thought I could hear the stridulation exchanged between ant compatriots on their linear path to and from their occupation. I got onto my knees and put my face near the sand to get a closer look at the ants. Some of them seemed to have strange bulges on their abdomen that looked like grains of sand had merged with their bodies. As I looked around, I saw that every open sandy space was covered in ants. I wondered if these were all from the same colony and if not, how far did these ants travel from this particular patch of sand over the course of their lives.

Now, within the shuffling of the ants and the rushing of the meadowlarks I heard the scratching of small rodent claws on a boulder 10 feet away and turned to see a kangaroo rat sitting on top of the rock. I watched her for a while as she waited on the boulder hoping to conceal herself from my gaze by remaining motionless. I slowly rose to walk over for a closer look. As I began to walk slowly towards the boulder my shins ached. I looked down, wondering if I had really been sitting that long only to find a dozen ants clinging to my legs, bravely trying to drive me away from their colony. Now that I noticed them the pain began to grow rapidly and I quickly brushed them off. This was not before they had produced red marks the size of a 50 cent piece on my shins. With the pain of the bites subsiding I made to continue my pursuit of the rat only to see that she had taken advantage of my preoccupation with those jingoistic ants to make good her escape.

As I made my way back up the hill I heard one last sound, the scraping of hiking boots over the rocks as another hiker emerged from the arch into the scrub field. I could no longer hear the sounds of the meadowlark and the ant and the rat, only the ordinary daily sounds of sand on boot soles and zippers clicking and jacket swishing. The morning was over and the day had begun and I made my way out of the field. As I left, I turned to look at the boulder and saw that the kangaroo rat had resumed her place at its summit.

A visit to Arches National Park benefits from a knowledge of the history of the geological oddities that have formed in the area over the last 150 million years. This way, when you're looking at a prime example of a fin arch like Skyline Arch, you can also realize that you're standing on top of what was once an ocean, then a 2 mile tall pillar of salt. You're also standing under the space were 5000 additional feet of sediment had settled before being washed away to reveal the 140 million year old entrada sandstone that forms the arch you now see.

The mechanisms that generated Arches National Park were set in motion at the bottom of an ocean 300 million years ago. The paradox basin was a deep bucket with its lip at sea level. As a result, Southern Utah was frequently submerged under an inland sea during interglacial periods when ice thawed and raised sea levels. During each ice age, sea levels would drop as water was collected into glaciers and the inland sea would be cut off from the retreating ocean. As a result, massive volumes of salt and other minerals were collected in the paradox basin as the trapped stagnant seas evaporated.

As this period of flowing and ebbing seas subsided, the great well of salt was being buried beneath sediment washed down from the Uncompahgre uplift to the Northeast. Squeezed beneath thousands of feet of sand and mud, the salt became liquid and flowed southwest in subterranean waves. These saline swells migrated southwest until they crashed into 6000 foot sheer cliffs that had resulted from northwest trending faults in southeast Utah. Their progress halted by these underground walls of stone, the salt began to push upward through the surrounding rock. At the same time, the red entrada sandstone that you see in Arches national park was solidifying at the surface. The intrusive strips of salt bulged and cracked the surface sandstone like a baking loaf of bread, parallel to the underlying fault lines.

These cracks allowed surface water to flow down to the rising salt to dissolve and wash it away to the ocean. This continued until less soluble gypsum left behind as the salt dissolved, formed a cap over the salt pillar and the sandstone collapsed into the void left by the departed salt. The cracks in the sandstone remained access points for water to enter and weather the sandstone. These cracks widened as freezing water broke them apart and wind cleaned them out, eventually leaving the long fins seen in The Devils Garden. Fins are crucial to the formation of arches, because it is the careful demolition of these fins by weathering that allows for holes in the fins to widen into great arches before falling completely.

The other crucial factor in the formation of arches is the composition of the fins. This is another aspect in which the Moab area is exceptional. The hard Entrada sandstone in underlain by the fragile siltstone of the Dewey Bridge member. As you look at the formations in Arches national park, you'll notice that most arches form at the junction between the Entrada and Dewey Bridge layers. The Dewey Bridge stone wears away much more quickly than the entrada and thus the entrada is undercut in many places. After being under such immense pressure for so many years, the newly exposed base of the Entrada layer begins to break apart as a way of decompressing. The pattern of weathering extends radially out from the division of the two strata and eventually widens into an arch. Water accomplishes this weathering by seeping into the cracks in the sandstone and expanding as it freezes, literally pushing out and breaking the stone apart from inside. These holes continue to grow through weathering until the fin becomes unstable and collapses.

Arches in all stages of life can be found in the park. The most recent arch to collapse, Wall Arch, is very close to Landscape Arch, the longest in the park. Landscape Arch is an arch near the end of this life cycle as well. By luck, none of the chunks of stone littering the area around the arch were vital enough to its stability to bring it down when they fell out. Large chunks have fallen out as recently as the 90s and it would appear that there aren't many more pieces that can be removed before this arch falls. At the same time, new arches are growing throughout the park. This means that the Arches National Park that people see 1000 years from now will look quite different than the one we see today. The spectacle of arches can remind us that while orogeny may progress at a ponderously slow pace, noticeable changes to the earth occur within a human lifetime.

Erosion and decay characterize the desert. Everything new in the desert is formed through the destruction of something old. A canyon gets deeper and more grand because older and older layers of rock are eaten away. It is the same for the stone monoliths; at some time, “ground level” was the top of the pillar of stone. Then slowly the ground was broken and washed away and by some luck in the makeup of the stone a pillar remained standing, marking where the earth’s surface used to be. These markers cannot last forever themselves and with the sides of the rock now exposed to the elements, water begins to whittle away the perimeter. Quirks in the distribution of the elements cause the stone to wear unevenly giving us impossibly balanced boulders and arches for a geological instant. These may look eternal in the way that they stand against the sky but they are just the last strands of sea foam that linger on the beach after the retreating wave, they will be reabsorbed into the earth. The obliterated stone will find its way into the Colorado River which will carry it to the sea where it will be pulled under the crust of the earth to be recycled into the matter that will one day emerge as new land from the seam in the middle of the pacific ocean.

Scale is not easily conveyed. One of the best things about seeing Arches for the first time is the realization of the size of its features. You’ll lie under an arch and realize you could fit a house inside, or even a small building. You even really get an idea of how big they are just by looking at them in person, you have to hear them. The echo of your shoe scuffing against loose sand and pebbles that you kick down while climbing give you the subconscious realization of these massive forms. To record all of these impressions in a picture and then transmit those feelings to a person who has never visited the place is impossible. The challenges in landscape photography are similar to those in architectural photography. The spot must be found where the features being photographed are arranged in such a way through the viewfinder that their organization will convey to the viewer of the photograph an understanding of the space. Being at the actual site, binocular vision and the way that the shapes change as we move around help us understand a space. When that space is compressed into a two dimensional image, we need clear hints of where the edges of the foreground give way to the background. Adjusting a highlight or darkening a shadow can guide the viewer’s eye to important features, making parts of the picture stand out and giving it depth. It also always helps to throw in a recognizable object to give a sense of scale. By the way, can you spot the person sitting with their body silhouetted against the sky?

A lack of trees and a distance from city lights are the things that make stargazing in the desert so wonderful. Arches NP is dangerously close to the city of Moab with its flood-lit hotel parking lots and even a spinning spotlight occasionally. On the night where I was waiting out a big storm in my car parked on the side of the park road I had a high vantage point facing towards moab looking out over the petrified sand dunes. As the storm passed and lightning struck I saw an orange glow in the distance and was sure that lightning had started a fire somewhere in the park. It was only later when I was trying to take pictures of the night sky that I realized this orange glow was actually the lights of Moab polluting the sky. Luckily, Moab is the only city around so the lights can be escaped if you retreat deep enough into the park.

Skyline arch is on the side of Arches opposite Moab and at a much higher elevation. At this height and with this sparse landscape you can see stars all the way down to the horizon line, something impossible from beneath the screen of dense vegetation on the east coast. Whenever I looked at the night sky, I felt like the stars were receding into the sky as I focused on them. I could catch a glimpse of the brilliantly speckled sky out of the corner of my eye with its superior night vision only to have the stars retreat when I turned to look. I think this is why a person can spend so long staring at the night sky. Your eyes dart back and forth almost beyond your control trying to catch a dense patch of stars that always seems to be just out of view.

Dark wedges in the starry sky was the form that the sandstone skyscapers of park avenue took the first time that I saw them. I was heading into Arches for the first time ever at 4 in the morning. The sun had not yet started to glow behind the La Sal mountains in the distance and I was driving the winding road up into the park. Looking ahead, I could not tell whether I was looking into the distant expanse of the petrified dunes or surrounded by cliffs looming overhead. Then I turned the corner leading to park avenue and I realized that the sky was not black, but riddled with more stars than I had ever seen. What I thought had been the black sky were the forms of sandstone cliffs towering over the road leading into the park. Having no sense of where I was, a strong feeling of uneasiness set in as I looked up at these dark forms that always appeared to be moving from the corner of my eye. However when I turned that corner and saw the shapes of these rock formations outlined in stars I knew instantly where I was. This view had become very familiar to me through the countless pictures I had found of the site while I was longing to visit Arches. They were unmistakeable, but so much larger than I had imagined. It was when I saw this that I finally felt that rush of being "there" where I had wanted to be for so long.

The effect may have been comparable if I had seen all of this for the first time during daylight, but I don't think that anything can compare to those magical hours that I spent in the park before sunrise that first day. Both the familiar and unexpected where slowly revealed as the sun rose, allowing me to compare what I had imagined during the pitch black drive in to the reality of my surroundings.

The trail, part three. This is from a different part of arches, "The Fiery Furnace" a maze of narrow paths and dark pits. It can be so disorienting that the visitors center recommends that you enter with a ranger if you've never been before. I gladly took them up on the offer. Our ranger-guide must have been pushing 70 but it was a delight to see him climbing over boulders and sliding through narrow cracks while the rest of up were fighting to keep up. He also provided interesting explanations of the surrounding environment.

One detail that would prove crucial to me at a later time was his explanation of the effect of rain on exposed sandstone. The cement that holds the sandstone in Arches together is calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate can be dissolved when it reacts with water and carbon dioxide. It just so happens that rain water accumulates enough carbon dioxide on its descent to earth that it creates just such a reaction. The result is that after a rain storm, the surfaces of sandstone boulders are covered in a thin layer of the sand left behind when its CaCO3 matrix dissolved.

The reason that this was so important to me is because I prefer to wear tennis shoes while hiking. I think that they are much more comfortable, and their shallow treads provide a great amount of friction on dry, rough sandstone. Once the rain storm happened, the sandstone began to act as a course grade sandpaper on the soles of my shoes, reducing my shallow treads to a smooth rubber in less than a day of hiking. Once this had happened, wet sand began to cling to the bottoms of my shoes. These sand grains acted as little ball bearings making it impossible for me to stand on more than a 10 degree incline before I would start to slowly slide away.

This was merely a source of annoyance and mild peril until I approached the flooded wash which I described in an earlier post. As I said, there were two options, find another route or wade waist-deep through the puddle which was about 30 feet across. Other hikers were arriving often enough that I decided not to risk taking off my pants to wade through and decided to find another route. I eventually determined that this was the only passage though an otherwise immense fin of sandstone that stretched as far as I could see in either direction. There was however a large and lumpy boulder sitting on one side of the puddle that would allow for dry passage provided that one could get on top of it. I tried every approach to climbing the boulder but just as I would reach for a handhold to pull myself up the last step, my useless shoes would invariably slip and send me bouncing down the side of the boulder. The humiliating thing was that the boulder really wasn't that steep. As some snooty kid would gleefully demonstrate to me, with a good pair of shoes you could run right up the side of it.

Eventually I decided to go back and find the biggest fallen tree branch that I could and try to plant it in the water as a step to where I could grab an easy handhold on the side of the boulder. The branch I found was roughly T shaped and quite flexible. As I edged myself towards the water, branch in hand, I started to slide towards the puddle and threw my hands out to stop myself. When I slammed the T shaped branch down in my hand, the three prongs stuck to the stone and stopped me instantly. What a wonderful invention! The wooden climbing claw was what I decided to call it as it allowed me to easily hoist myself up the side of the boulder to safety.

Once I had reached the other side another group of hikers came into view. I called over to them and explained what I had done to get by and told them that I'd toss them the stick that I had used. I hurled the stick with amazing inaccuracy, bouncing it off the wall and depositing it in the middle of the puddle. Without saying another word I just turned around and continued with my hike. Figuring out how to get over that puddle was the most fun part of my day and I realized I shouldn't deny them of the same pleasure.

Don't be lazy! Turret Arch, Double Arch, the North and South Widows are all visible from a paved parking lot in Arches National Park. Many visitors take advantage of this, taking their pictures only a few yards from the start of the trail, just enough to hide the fact that they're standing next to the sign-post announcing the beginning of the trail. People generally don't enjoy long car rides but wide open national parks seem to make them crave the confines of an automobile, I even saw one family photograph this entire area drive-by style except they didn't roll down their windows to shoot.

What that family did miss was this little tree, half dead, growing in a mud pit below the grand turret arch, but somehow even more impressive than the arch itself. It seems like such a perfect place for a little tree to grow that I can only imagine that this spot has been occupied by a long line of trees for as long as this arch has been in existence. So while the family on wheels was probably already rolling past balanced rock I was slipping down rocky slopes and landing in muddy potholes, climbing up to get a better view and running across narrow passes trying not to fall 30 feet to the ground below.

In the book Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey laments the attempts by the Government to make Arches more accessible with paved roads to every attraction. Well, even those roads failed, they'll have to pave the trails and rent out ATVs if they really want to force those ungrateful to see the outdoors.