Day 9, 10: Arches and Rest

Moab Utah is a very scenic place. The city is bordered on both sides by mountains as you can see by this picture looking north-ish along the main street. The other picture is from within Arches National Park looking back towards the green city of Moab.

It is also about a mile from the Arches National Park, which is convenient as that is where we are going today. As the movie in the visitor center reinforced, Arches is a part of the Colorado plateau, as is Grand Canyon and Bryce, et al. And while interesting in its own right, it isn't as interesting as Bryce.

But nevertheless, it is home to some very unusual geography. Apparently, some millions of years ago, sandstone was laid over a salt dome. The salt dome partially dissolved, and the sandstone and rock above it collapsed, creating faults within it -- places for erosion to occur. Erosion left giant slabs of rock called 'fins' exposed.

Some of the fins have softer rock below, and it erodes from the bottom up, leaving holes in the fins. The results are the arches. In fact, I'm going to jump ahead and show a couple pictures of the 'Delicate Arch' used as the official logo of Utah. The picture to the left, has the arch nearly in the center of the picture. Hopefully, you can see it. The picture to the right is what Kelley and I saw with the zoom lens after we hiked a half mile to the outlook. Yep, minus the kids. This was at the end of the trip, and they were pooped, so I'm giving you the dessert first. We could have taken a 3 mile hike to see it close up. Yeah, right :-) But it was pretty cool, and yes, the picture really is level! This is the single most famous arch. It's still eroding, just not as fast as Bryce geology is.

We had fun going to the 'Windows' section of arches. There are a number of arches (North and South Window, and Turret Window). They are all within easy hiking distance and we took our time. We lucked out, although it was very dry here and in the 90's, the temps soared to the 100's (F) the day we left for Yellowstone. So, even though it was a bit cloudy (thoroughly cursed by Kelley :-) the conditions were tolerable. (Dry heat; just keep saying it to yourself!)

There wasn't a lot of wildlife, unless you count the cryptobiotic ground cover (funny it looked like scaley ground to me) that is a mix of bacteria and other small life that gives the greener ground-cover the wedge it needs to get started. Everywhere they had the equivalent of the 'don't walk on the grass' signs. Once damaged, the cryptobiotic (I like typing that) life can take 250 years to recover completely.

However, we did see this fine specimen of a lizard on the trail. He's just not as large as he appears, here. And of course, the ravens. You could hear them complaining to each other in the distance like grumpy old men.

But, on to the arches. Here, at Arches, we actually get to climb on stuff. That's pretty cool. Here, I believe we have the South Window. It's large, and reminds me of the 'Time Bagel' from Star Trek. Oh, you know the one; from 'City on the Edge of Forever' where Shatner gets to kiss and kill ... oh never mind. It also looks like an eye. To the right, we are relaxing in the 'tear duct' of the eye; the right hand side. Pretty comfy.

Next, we visited the North Window. To the left, we see Corey and Dad waving. Now we pull back and show you where we are. We're somewhere there. We found a trail around the back of the window and scaled some almost too difficult sliprock to get up there. And it was windy when we got to the top. I think Corey believes me now when I say that getting down is harder than getting up! On the way up, he offered to go first since he didn't think he'd be able to catch me if I fell. I appreciated the thought, but told him his job was to get out of the way of me and the rocks with me if I was on my way down :-)

Finally, at Turret Window, we had an 'incident' (just in fun). Take these in order from left-to-right, top-to-bottom.








There are other interesting features that aren't arches. Here's one called the three gossips. And to the right, is balanced rock.

Even with all the dryness, there still was some pretty flowers at this time of year. Kelley took a picture of one of them.

Finally, we were tired. And you know what? We declared that the next day was a day off instead of going to Canyonland. I'm sure it is a really nice place, but we were just tired of being in the car all the time.

So we bummed around Moab and found some neat stores and restaurants. One of my favorites is a place called Eclectica -- a coffee, breakfast, and lunch sorta place that you have to practically fight through the Honeysuckle to get to. We also found a 'secret' park about 5 miles out of town along the Colorado River called 'Moonflower' with exceptionally fine red sand.

Unfortunately, we seem to have had the first problem with photographs -- we used the kids camera to take a bunch of pictures of Moab, Eclectica, and the Moonflower place but they seem to be gone. Sigh. Hopefully they'll turn up, and I've just misplaced them.