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ARCHES NATIONAL PARK +BABY

Exploring the American West with an 8 week old

By Tommy Nagle

March 10^th, 2020

CAPITOL REEF ➼ ARCHES

After two and a half hour's drive through eastern Utah, we arrived at Arches National Park in the mid-afternoon, with no place to stay for the night. But we cared not a jot. Oh, the joys of an Recreational Ve-hickle.

Deemed more important than finding a place to stay was the cramming of arches into our eyeballs. We had to go and see what all the fuss was about.

⇡ One of the first views in the park. No arches to speak of, but you can't win 'em all. ⇡

🤠

BRIEF INTERMISSION:

During a break while I was in the process of constructing this story, I fired up the old Netflix account and put on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Because it's great. Lo and behold, who should appear in the first five minutes of the film? None other than lil' old Arches National Park herself.

Sticklers might try to point out that...

*pushes broken glasses repaired with sticky tape back up nose*

"Um, actually, you can't ride horses through the park like that, that's illegal."

However, the two-minute sequence you can watch below is set in 1912, a full 17 years before Arches was first designated a national monument.

IN YOUR FACE STICKLER.

The first arch we saw, the one that everyone associates with Arches National Park, and perhaps the most famous natural stone arch in the world was/is:

DELICATE ARCH HIKE | Easy | 3 miles round trip | 480ft elevation change

There are over 2000 stone arches in the park, but due to its unique structure, Delicate Arch has become one of the symbols of Utah, appearing on everything from license plates to postcards, signposts to stickers, t-shirts to tattoos.

The trail wends its way up a gentle incline, past a natty series of rusted steel and white acrylic signposts, more of which you'll see later.

If you're lucky/ridiculously early in the morning/late at night, you'll get the place to yourself. If you're like us, and go up on a balmy weekend evening, then the place will be packed.

But no matter, it's a fun place to hang out regardless.

POSING AT DELICATE ARCH: A GUIDE

If you wish to have a photograph taken of yourself posing under Delicate Arch, you must join the semi-orderly queue, formed on the left of the aforementioned arch.

When your turn arrives, after making your way down to the opening, you are allowed to perform one of three (and a half) sanctioned poses:

1: Jump in the air.

2: Stand with arms wide.

2.5: Jump in the air + arms wide.

3: Point at arch as if you're surprised such a thing exists.

The above are the only 3(.5) poses allowed.

It's the law. Look it up.

AWESOME NEW FEATURE ALERT

I've been playing with a cool new toy to help give you, dear reader, a little bit more of a sense of scale and place. Click play below.

If you were so inclined, the arch's opening is large enough to fit a double decker bus in (if you turned it on its end). It's the largest free-standing arch in the park.

How was it formed? Well I'm not going to try to explain it myself. I'll just let the US Geological Survey do the work:

"Delicate Arch was formed by the movement of underground salt beds beneath overlying sandstone, in concert with surface events including water, ice, and erosion, which washed away or broke off the sandstone to create the arches and fins found throughout Arches National Park."

If you don't know, now you know.

The name "Delicate" arch can be traced back to a 1934 article, describing it as "the most delicately chiseled arch in the entire area."

But it's also had other names, from "Salt Wash Arch" to the more descriptive "Cowboy's Chaps" and "Old Maid's Bloomers".

Off the Delicate Arch trail is a brief ten minute detour that will lead you to some petroglyphs; rock carvings that are anywhere between 150 to 350(ish) years old.

Depicted are a trio of riders among a herd of big horn sheep. Other beasts loiter around the margins. What's that in the bottom left? A dog? A cat? A giant possum? We'll never know. Ute Indians from 350 years ago, please leave a note next time.

Arches even has its own set of hoodoos.

Who needs Bryce Canyon, huh? Bryce Schmanyon more like. HAHA LOL. Or something.

Being as we were with teeny child, we weren't particularly quick on our hike to see Delicate Arch, so by the time we had completed the walk, the sun was beginning to set.

At the time we were there, the roads were being resurfaced, and anyone left in the park after a certain time was told they'd get a hefty fine, or at the very least a stern ticking off. With that in mind, we made our way back toward the entrance of the park, via...

Resembling a teardrop-shaped muddy jewel poised on a plinth, all the guidebooks and websites speak of how big and/or heavy Balanced Rock is.

They'll say things like:

"Balanced Rock, one of the most iconic features in the park, stands a staggering 128 feet tall."

OK great. But what does that actually mean? How does one envisage that?

Let me help:

• 128ft is roughly the height of 21 six-foot tall people stood on top of each other.

No good?

• OK, it's as tall as a 13 story building.

No good either?

• Half a Boeing 747 airliner?

What? You've never seen a plane?

• 250 average sized bananas placed end to end.

Surely that clears it up.

Fair enough. 128ft is tall. But what got me was the weight.

"Eventually, the 3,600 ton (over 4 million kg) boulder will come tumbling down"

4 MILLION KILOS? FOUR MILLION?

This sucker weighs THREE TIMES AS MUCH as the Falcon Heavy Rocket.

That's over THREE THOUSAND Toyota Corollas.

I've checked this multiple times, and I still can't believe it's right.

🤯

⇡ View of Balanced Rock from the parking lot, me hanging over the fence ⇡

You don't really get a sense of scale from the above, but perhaps the below extra bonus awesome feature, as previously seen at Delicate Arch, above, will help. The size of the road on the left should give you an idea of how massive this thing is.

⇣

On the relatively short drive back to the entrance, photogenic panoramas abound.

I couldn't help myself.

Our last stop before leaving the park, La Sal Mountains Viewpoint is basically a small parking lot, blessed with a great view of the scenery in and around the park.

On this particular evening we also got to experience a wonderful sunset, the sky seemingly vibrating with intense hues of pink, orange and blue.

⨇

There is camping allowed inside Arches, at Devils Garden Campground, but as with many National Parks in busy months, it was full. We stayed in nearby Moab, in an RV park that was perfectly fine, though nothing to write home about.

Side thought: I wonder if any RV parks are anything to write home about.

Bathtime

Plonked in a washing up bowl and your arse exposed for all on the internet to see.

I look forward to him seeing this one day, years from now. I shall say, sagely,

"Son, the internet is forever. Let this be a warning to you."

≏

The following day, the plan was, naturally, to take in as many arches as possible. The best way to do this was to to walk the Devils Garden Loop Trail:

DEVILS GARDEN LOOP TRAIL | Moderate | 7.5 miles round trip | 1069ft elevation change

A short half-mile detour on the way to Landscape Arch is Pine Tree Arch, so named because there's supposedly a grove of pine trees on the other side. Now I'm not saying they're lying, but I didn't see a pine tree grove. But then again, perhaps I'm not that observant.

⇣ Below you can see how the arch is nestled on the edge of the stone 'fins' which are so prevalent within the park ⇣

Are those pine trees? I was thinking something more along the lines of Christmas trees. But then the arch would probably have a different name altogether.

"THE LARGEST (STONE) ARCH ON THE PLANET"

-UTAH.COM

"YEAH, IT'S LIKE, SUPER BIG"

- BARTON, 25

"EVEN BIGGER THAN KOLOB ARCH IN ZION"

- SOME GUIDE BOOK

"YEAH BUT HAVE YOU SEEN THE GATEWAY ARCH IN ST LOUIS?"

- STEVEN, 19

"SHUT UP STEVEN, THAT DOESN'T COUNT"

- MR HARRISON, 58, GEOGRAPHY TEACHER

At one of the viewing areas for Landscape Arch, there's a plaque which details the precise moment, back in 1991, when a huge slab of rock fell from what would be the right hand side in the pictures above.

Adorably, in the newspaper story from the day following the fall, the reporter noted:

"The video was recorded by a European whose tape isn't compatible with American equipment. But park officials said the tourists promised to mail copies of videos and photos to park offices in Moab once they arrive home."

Funny to think that if it happened today, it would be on YouTube within 20 minutes, with about 14 ads for Amazon Alexa. It is actually on YouTube (here) but only as a screen recording of a documentary from 2003.

Following the rest of the loop trail around, you get to walk up the spines of various 'fins', rocks that have been weathered to the point where they resemble plates stacked side by side on a dish rack.

Ascending the fins is an exciting experience, as the drop offs can get precipitous fairly quickly. I'm glad we didn't have to do it in slippery winter weather, otherwise I would have probably chickened out...

[By way of typography from a 90s skateboarding video game. I really don't know how that happened. Sorry about that.]

Partition Arch feels more like a window than an arch (albeit a giant, 30 foot window) with a view spanning one of the park's valleys. There's a smaller opening to the side of the main arch. They're part of the same piece of rock as Landscape Arch.

Navajo Arch is unlike most of the other arches in the park. On a side trail from the Devils Garden loop, it resembles a tunnel of sorts, such is the depth of the stone that has been bored through. At the base of the arch is a sandy alcove, and in the time that the arch has been around, trees have begun to grow underneath.

It felt much more peaceful here than some of the other landmarks, perhaps due to the fact that it's more out-of-the-way than many others, but it was also a cool, shady spot.

At the far end of Devils Garden is Double O Arch, the second largest arch formation in the area after Landscape Arch. The stacked arches span 71 feet on top and 21 feet on the bottom, and remind me of some sort of gnarly skate park. Hey, perhaps I should have reserved my Partition Arch typography for this bit.

Double Arch

If you watched the clip from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at the start of this story, you might recognise Double Arch as the place where young Indiana discovers a tunnel leading to some unscrupulous archeologists/grave diggers.

Unlike many of the other arches that were formed by erosion from the side, Double Arch was formed by water erosion from above - the water wearing the sandstone away over time, creating a giant basin, eventually leaving holes in the side and in the top.