Utah continues to be a state full of surprizes for me.  I swung back north through Utah, with a vague plan of then turning east through Colorado, and visiting Arches National Park along the way.  Unexpectedly, I also found myself driving through Monument Valley in southern Utah.  Somehow I had managed to completely miss the fact that this place existed on my maps, but it certainly made for a lovely drive, and I’d like to see more of it again someday.

When I finally arrived at Arches, it turned out to be one of those popular parks with lots of cars trying to get through the entry gate at once.  But my annual pass served me well here, as they had a ranger screening out those of us with passes, and sending us down a slip lane to bypass the main line.  Excellent!

The park itself is larger than I anticipated, covering about 77,700 acres, and having a main scenic road about 35 miles long, not including side routes.  In addition to over 2,000 sandstone arches that the park is known for, the rock formations and columns are really unique.  Oh dear.

I did a few short hikes in the park, and saw some of the more famous formations, but how such a variety of formations is created, what rock is eroded away and what remains, is really mind boggling.

I loved getting out in the landscape, like walking up this dry watercourse.  You can see a couple walking in the distance for scale.  There were many beautiful swirls in the bedrock caused by the water that flows in the wet season.  This is along the Park Avenue Trail.

I don’t know if this formation has a name (it probably does, they all seem to), but I loved the look of the marble rock caught in the larger columns.

This is another view looking back down Park Avenue, with the formation called The Organ in the distance, and… moving on…

There really wasn’t a bad view anywhere in the park, and this picture will give you an idea of the scale of the place.

Although climbing on the arches in not permitted, hiking up to the base of them is quite common, including here at Balanced Rock, which is… um… quite large… and impressive…

But the really outstanding feature of the park is obviously the arches.  According to Wikipedia, who can explain this far better than I can: “The national park lies atop an underground evaporite layer or salt bed, which is the main cause of the formation of the arches, spires, balanced rocks, sandstone fins, and eroded monoliths in the area. This salt bed is thousands of feet thick in places, and was deposited in the Paradox Basin of the Colorado Plateau some 300 million years ago when a sea flowed into the region and eventually evaporated. Over millions of years, the salt bed was covered with debris eroded from the Uncompahgre Uplift to the northeast…. The weight of this cover caused the salt bed below it to liquefy and thrust up layers of rock into salt domes. The evaporites of the area formed more unusual salt anticlines or linear regions of uplift. Faulting occurred and whole sections of rock subsided into the areas between the domes. In some places, they turned almost on edge. The result of one such 2,500-foot (760 m) displacement, the Moab Fault, is seen from the visitor center.  As this subsurface movement of salt shaped the landscape, erosion removed the younger rock layers from the surface. Except for isolated remnants, the major formations visible in the park today are the salmon-colored Entrada Sandstone, in which most of the arches form, and the buff-colored Navajo Sandstone. These are visible in layer cake fashion throughout most of the park. Over time, water seeped into the surface cracks, joints, and folds of these layers. Ice formed in the fissures, expanding and putting pressure on surrounding rock, breaking off bits and pieces. Winds later cleaned out the loose particles. A series of free-standing fins remained. Wind and water attacked these fins until, in some, the cementing material gave way and chunks of rock tumbled out. Many damaged fins collapsed. Others, with the right degree of hardness and balance, survived despite their missing sections. These became the famous arches.”

This is the famous Landscape Arch, the longest arch in the park.  It’s reached by hiking the Devil’s Garden Trail, and extremely impressive and delicate looking in person.

There are smaller arches, really more like holes in the rock fins like Tunnel Arch, scattered throughout the park.

This was Pine Tree Arch, although the reason for the name was not apparent.  After hiking down through I it, I was startled by a rattle snake on the other side, but wasn’t quick enough to get a picture!

This is Delicate Arch, seen from a distance.  Those little dots are people hiking in a line to get close to it.

You may have noticed that a number of these pictures were taken from a distance.  And there were many more arches in the park that required some hiking to see, and I just didn’t get to them.  The truth is that I just wasn’t feeling well at this point.  Perhaps the non-stop travelling, over three months and 17,000 miles on my own, was just getting to me.  Almost certainly I was also quite dehydrated, struggling with headaches, fatigue, and disorientation, a couple of times driving on the wrong side of the road and hallucinating cars pulling out in front of me.  The expert advice of my doctor friend (hi Dr Tom!) was to “stop being an idiot.”  He advised me to stop someplace for a while, drink up, and rest up.  So following my attenuated visit to Arches, I made my way to Grand Junction, Colorado, where I spend four days in an actual hotel, eating real food, drinking water like a fish, and I even got a massage.  I spent my mornings in Barnes and Noble Bookshop drinking Starbucks coffee like a civilized human being.  I had waffles for breakfast and steaks for dinner. I’m feeling better already, have caught up with my blogging, and will be ready to get back on the road soon.  Sometimes I think I have more stamina than actual strength, and keep going long after I should.  Or maybe it’s common sense that I’m somewhat lacking in?  In any case, all is well again, not to worry.  Onward and eastward!!

Where shall I go next?!?!?!?