August 23rd
We turned into Arches National Monument and sat in a fairly long line of cars waiting to enter. As the car in front of us paid and drove off, the teller’s shutter came rattling down and a cardboard sign saying “Pay on way out” appeared. It was 11:59 am and I guess lunch is very important in these parts. We drove on in.
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| Arches general view |
Arches contains miles of car trails. Armed with the provided map, we started up the sheer cliff (or so it seemed to me) that was the entrance road to the park. There was a lot of screaming every time we came to a corner. It was coming from me. At the first vehicle turn out it’s possible to see the major layout of the rock formations, which if you squint a little bit did look like carvings of sheep, gossips, teapots and so forth. It’s frankly bizarre to see them just standing there, looking very much like Shelley’s Two Vast And Trunkless Legs of Stone standing in the desert. Just as strange are the “Petrified Dunes” and, when we eventually came across, them, the famous arches themselves.
Even though the Lady Who Hands The Map To You had gone to lunch, we had managed to procure a map from somewhere and on the map is a demystification. They aren’t the work of crazed settler stonemasons or even the local trickster gods. Apparently – and this is much harder to believe in than any trickster god – the area used to be covered by a sea, which dried up leaving a giant salt pan. Dust and sand blowing in over millions of years eventually formed rocks over the top of the salt bed, which ultimately grew up to a mile deep. The salt bed, not surprisingly, was not up for this, and started to flow, in some areas pushing the rock up into domes and in others collapsing and letting the rock fall and crack. Due to some peculiar conditions in the area of the park, the long fissures in the rock wore down until the rocks were arrayed in what the brochure describes as “fins”, which is probably accurate if you think of fins on a heat sink or car rather than on a fish. These parallel “fins” further wore down into towers in some places and, where undercut, arches in other areas of the park. Areas which were to prove to be much further away. The brochure/map does rather undermine itself, in the way that salt beds undermine a rock, I suppose, by finishing the story with, “- probably. The evidence is largely circumstantial.”
The evidence may be circumstantial, but it is also humongous. At the next stop, when you could climb up to the base of the first big Thing (its cute name has fled my memory), the overwhelming feeling is of size. I’m used to the Cow and Calf at Ilkley, so it’s not like I’ve never met a rock before, but freestanding ones of that size hanging around when all the material that used to join it to its friends has disappeared without trace is quite unusual.
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| Base of the first giant tall thing in Arches |
Next up was a short puff from another turn-out to Balancing Rock. No surprises here; it’s a rock that is balancing. Once again, it is gigantic. It may be cheating a little to have a type of rock that weathers differently from the rock below that stays where it was (above) while most of the surrounding rock disappears being called “balancing” – it’s more
hasn’t fallen yet. It’s still remarkable. It used to have a companion, called Baby Balancing Rock or somesuch, that stopped balancing in the seventies and fell with a crash. Its debris is still at the foot of Balanced Rock. Amusingly, the low wall built to keep tourists off the Biological Soil Crust had already unbalanced and also lay in a pile at the foot of balanced rock. There’s clearly more to balancing than is known in yer philosophy.
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| Balancing Rock |
Biological Soil Crust (the cutesy name they’ve come up with is Cryptobiotic Crust, which sounds like a vegan low-carb pizza) is the life of the top layer of the desert, which they say is made up of cyanobacteria, lichen, algae and fungi, although I thought cyanobacteria, algae and fungi together
were lichen, but whatever. This rather minuscule living layer is unsurprisingly slow growing and easily disrupted by the grinding feet of over-eager photographers. There are signs everywhere reminding you not to do so. Even the vertical faces of the rocks are stained with “desert varnish”, which looks as though someone has let cooking stains drip down the rock, but are the result of cyanobacteria remorselessly attempting to get minerals and energy by oxidizing various metals in the stone.
The other living things visible in this completely inhospitable desert (not a café in sight) are dwarf, stunted, twisted, blasted junipers, which would look eerie or disfigured in most circumstances but here are plainly the result of trying to hang on to life with no rain and only the occasional cyanobacterium to eat. Some have given up and their ropelike dead trunks are used to line the trails to keep us away from the Biological Soil Crust, and some seem to be doing well. They are in it for the long haul.
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| Trees of Arches |
Eventually an actual visible arch was promised, but it was some miles away. Nonetheless, we decided to hike to the view as I was suffering from arch shortage by this point. The main hike was three miles, beyond the reach of my travel-swollen feet and the other was, I forget, maybe half a mile. It turned out to be half a mile horizontally but at least three miles vertically, so there was a great deal of whining on my part as we trekked over the broken rocks up a giant hill. At the top, you could indeed see an arch – it was about two miles away. I took a photo. My first arch! To be fair, it was right on top of a ridge, looking like a Science Fiction teleportation gate to some unexplored binary a billion light years away.
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| Arch on the horizon |
Although the landscape around here is almost an unbroken red – as is indeed the greater part of America, at least in my experience – there are much smaller areas of green rock. I knowledgeably assumed these were stained with copper but someone eventually explained that these, like the red rocks, were colored by iron salts, but reduced iron rather than the oxidized red. Ferric iron oxide is red and forms in well-oxygenated areas. The green areas are ferrous iron, formed in low oxygen areas, but a fairly long google search wouldn’t tell me ferrous what. Sulfide? Ferrous iron dissolves in water but precipitates out when oxidized. Even more irritatingly, the informant we eavesdropped on did not choose to let on within earshot why ferrous iron ions on the surface of the desert would remain green and reduced. I would assume they’d oxidize within years. But then again, my first guess was copper ions, so who am I to second guess the park geologists.
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| Green, green ferrous ions of Arches |
Back in the RV we ate more of our thinning supply of Indian snackereenos and drove on, past the Fiery Furnace, a hellscape that glows convincingly red at sunset, which alas was not what time it was when we were there. Some miles further on despite the blevy of complaints I’d emitted at the first trail, we stopped again to take a walking trail. This time we were headed to an actual arch! There was a park warden stationed at the beginning of the trail to remind us that we only had two hours left before the park closed. Why does the park close? Are there gremlins roaming it at night? It was 1.6 miles to Landscape Arch, which doesn’t sound very much, particularly given the American distances we’d been driving, but as usual it drove me nuts within the first half mile. We asked a ranger if we’d actually see an arch, and he pointed to a stooped man coming out of a faint at the top of a burning rise and said, “See that man? You can see Landscape Arch from where he is.” We yomped on, and on getting to the top of the rise and recovering from my own lack of oxygen, I looked around and failed to see the Landscape Arch. I could see the ranger, though, half a mile ahead and he waved at us. “Sorry,” he shouted, “I meant from here!”
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| The space between two "fins" |
“Everything in this park is a lie,” I said firmly and walked the trail some more. After a while, the trail went from desert and rocky to wooded and hilly and after an even longer while I realized that part of the landscape to the side was moving past my peripheral vision faster than the rest of the landscape, as if it wasn’t part of it. I shrugged this off as evidence of lack of oxygen but the feeling didn’t go away, and I stood still and looked at it straight on. Standing above the hillside, but camouflaged by dint of its color, was a Brobdingnagian stone arch, delicate and fair and quite unlike the vast slabs of sandstone I’d seen elsewhere. My mind mentally switched in the image on Utah license plate – it was the same arch! It was quite worth the effort we’d undertaken to get there. According to a sign, it had been accessible on foot until recently, when a bit of stone had dropped out of one end. I can imagine the fear that must have engendered in the park staff as they contemplated one of their arches hitting the hillside in pieces, but the remainder stayed up, looking ever more impermanent and wispy. To prevent the inevitable moaning that would occur if the rest fell on someone, you now can't leave the trail and go thump it to see if it as delicate as it looks.
As we took it in, we realized we could see another, redder, arch on the horizon in the distance, but we had now had our arch and turned back before the gremlins were loosed upon the land.
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| "Varnish" stains on a fin - cyanobacteria metabolites |
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| A fin head on |
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| Flora |
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| Fauna |
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| An everlovin' arch! |
Pic: Landscape Arch. Yes, it is difficult to tell the foreground from the background. It's almost as hard when you're there, unless you move your head from side to side. The delicate thread of rock across the top is the very top of an arch. Everything else in the picture is behind it.
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| Next arch up |
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| Desert varnish |
At the exit, there was nobody taking fares from those of us who had entered during the lunch break. A brief investigation didn’t reveal anyone who looked like they were officials, so we shrugged and drove on out.
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| Not even part of the National Park. Utah's just like this. |
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| Hey, does anyone know where Hole In The Rock is? I can't find it. |
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| Arch found in the wild |
It’s a relatively short drive – 12 or so miles – from this exoplanetary landscape to the relative normality of Moab. Our phones were working again and detected a Chinese restaurant on Main Street, which we found hidden behind a collection of fountains, some drier than others. It’s called the Szechuan, and was once again considerably better than local South Orange County fare. It had a number of Chinese people at the tables, which is always a good sign, and served up a very nice Ma Po Tofu. I love Ma Po Tofu.
Rather than stay in Moab we drove off to Monticello (no relation). Luckily we weren’t required to be able to pronounce it, because I certainly couldn’t. We got a place at the Mountain View RV park on the main street. (It seems there’s quite often room for a 30 Amp “rig” even when the larger slots are filled up.) Mountain View has its own little library of books left by travelers so we annoyed the owner for half an hour choosing which book to borrow. Delightfully, the RV park had a laundromat so we were able to empty the giant bag of washing and refill the backpacks and roller-bags. It may indeed have had a mountain view, but it was dark when we ventured out to the gas stations opposite to score coffee and Cheesy Wotsits. (No sev, alas.) A customer in the gas station with us asked the attendant “what that mountain over there is”, and the attendant was completely stumped, so I guess the mountain of which we might have had a view is not all that and a bag of chips.
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