[This is the fourth installment of a travelogue from our recent trip to national parks and one state park in Utah and Colorado. Two more installments will follow. You can find the first installment here, the second installment here, and the third installment here.]
Arches National Park, just north of Moab, Utah, is a stunning landscape. It is home to over 2,000 natural arches, the highest density of natural stone arches in the world. In addition there are hundreds of rock peaks, massive rock fins, and giant balanced rocks. The park is the 44th largest national park, encompassing 76,519 acres or 119 square miles.
President Herbert Hoover issued a Presidential Proclamation establishing Arches as a national monument in April 1929. Franklin Roosevelt, in 1939, and Dwight Eisenhower, in 1960, expanded the size of the national monument. In November 1971, President Richard Nixon signed the legislation establishing Arches as a national park.
The morning we arrived at the park, we drove to the end of the park road to the Devil’s Garden Trailhead. Before getting there, we stopped to admire Skyline Arch, which is easily viewed from the camp road. In 1940, the opening of the arch roughly doubled in size when a large boulder suddenly fell out of the arch.
We began a hike to Landscape Arch at the Devil’s Garden Trailhead. The trail first passes between fins, relatively slender rock formations formed as water and ice erode the sandstone rock.
The trail to Landscape Arch has a short spur that leads to two other arches, Tunnel Arch and Pine Tree Arch.
Tunnel Arch sits high on a rock wall.
Pine Tree Arch is ground level.
At 306 feet, Landscape Arch is the largest arch in North America and one of the longest spans of any natural arch in the world. At its thinnest, the arch is only six feet in diameter. Large portions of the arch came crashing down in 1990, a reminder that these arches are constantly affected by the elements.
Just a few yards down the trail, one can catch a glimpse of Partition Arch, with its two-window opening.
After getting off the trail, our next stop was the Wolfe Ranch. In 1898, 69 year old John Wesley Wolfe, a Civil War veteran, left his wife and three of their children in Ohio and headed west to find a drier climate. He took with him his oldest son, Fred. Together they established the Bar DX Ranch in what is now Arches National Park. At one point, their ranch had more than 1,000 head of cattle.
In 1906, John Wolfe’s daughter and her husband came to live with him. His daughter was reportedly appalled by the conditions in which John and Fred lived. She demanded that they build a cabin with a floor and windows. That cabin still stands in the park. The ranch was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
Of course, Wolfe and his family were not the first to live here. Not far from the cabin is a wall of petroglyphs believed to have been created by nomadic Shoshonean Ute and Paiute Indians sometime in the 1600s or later. The evidence for this is in the petroglyphs themselves, which show people riding horses. Horses had been native to North America, but went extinct 10,000 to 12,000 years before the Spanish reintroduced them in the 17th century.
The parking lot for the Wolfe Ranch also serves as the trailhead for trail that leads to Delicate Arch, the symbol of Arches National Park. The Delicate Arch trail is 3.2 miles long and rated as being of “moderate” difficulty. With temperatures in the 90s, we elected to drive a mile farther down the road from the Wolfe Ranch to Lower Delicate Arch Viewpoint. From there, we could see the arch one mile away.
Delicate Arch is the largest freestanding arch in the park. The opening at the base measures 32 feet and is 48 feet high.
While we had packed a picnic lunch, by the time we got to the Delicate Arch Viewpoint, we needed some relief from the heat of the high desert. We went back to our hotel room in Moab and then returned to the park later in the day.
Returning to the park, we decided to hike the Park Avenue Trail. The trail descends through a canyon. After the initial 50 feet or so, the trail becomes rather indistinct and one must follow rock cairns, although it is clear the direction you want to go is down the canyon.
While AllTrails rates the trail as “easy,” we found that to be generous. We eventually turned back to the trailhead. Nonetheless, being at the bottom of the canyon was awesome. The various rock forms in the canyon have been given names. One of the rock panels on the right in the photo above is known as “Queen Victoria Rock.” I’ll let you figure out which one, because I don’t see it.
The rocks in the photo below have names that are easier to see. At the top left is “Queen Nefertiti” and at the bottom right is “Sausage Rock,” sometimes called the “corn dog.”
On the floor of the canyon, there are Utah Junipers, a tree that frequently caught my attention. Of course, there are so few trees in the high desert, it is hard to miss them. The junipers are 10 to 30 feet tall and often have a twisted, gnarly trunk shaped by fierce winds.
Even when they have died, I found their twisted bodies picturesque.
After abandoning the Park Avenue trail, we headed deeper into the park to see Balanced Rock. Our trip took us past the Tower of Babel and …
the Three Gossips.
Balanced Rock is a massive boulder made of Entrada sandstone that sits atop a pedestal made of Dewey Bridge mudstone. The whole structure is 128 feeet tall. Entrada Sandstone is mostly fine-grained, smooth, and resistant sand. Dewey Bridge is made of wavy mudrock, siltstone, and shale, that wears away much faster than Entrada sandstone.
The mudstone pedestal is slowly eroding away. Eventually, the 3,600 ton boulder will come tumbling down as happened to the Rock’s smaller sibling, “Chip-Off-the-Old-Block,” during the winter of 1975-76. To see a before an after of Chip on the National Park Service site, follow this link.
Leaving the park, we passed sand dunes that formed 180 million years ago. Over time, nature’s forces compressed the dunes, and calcium carbonate cemented them together.
That’s it for now. The next installment will take us to Canyonlands National Park.