Arches, Continuing On...

The Windows section of Arches National Park

   For those of you who have never visited Arches National Park in the southern end of Utah, just picture an area that you love, a place which you feel that everyone should see at some point in their lives.  It could be something of a natural earthly feature, say Victoria Falls or a herd of wild elephants; or it could be something constructed by humans such as the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids.  It could even be somewhere as simple as the bakery down the street.  But likely your friends live far away, or are entirely different from you in their tastes.  They want to camp and you want to stay in a hotel, or they want to visit a city and you want to head out to the wild, or they want to stay right where they are and you want to explore.  Everyone is different and that's what makes the world go around.  But it's difficult to ignore your passion, whatever that may be.  For Moab, the sleepy gateway town to Arches, there comes that same dilemma of whether to accept, encourage, or fight off the change.  With over a million visitors coming to Arches each year, the roads and noise around Moab are reaching their limits.  Large freight trucks have to slow to a third of their speed as their air brakes pop and snap while they crawl through the town, the road through town being the only short way to connect further through this part of the state.  But tourism drives this once dying town (in the 80s, nearly every other home was boarded up).  Now, new hotel chains contrast sharply with the exposed and weathered phone and electric poles.  Old homes and shops appearing in need of repair exist next to thriving outdoor restaurants catering to the youthful crowd that has come to ride their mountain bikes on the slick rock or to run the rivers, a hippie-like charm still matching the old music that eeks out of the background speakers as if reflecting its own dilemma of stand still or move on.  Why change, or perhaps why not change?  The mix proved intriguing...

   This was all somewhat echoed in the park brochure that greets you as you enter Arches: Over time water seeped into the cracks, joints, and folds.  Ice formed in the fissures, expanding and pressuring the rock breaking off bits and pieces.  Wind later cleaned out the loose particles, leaving a a series of freestanding fins.  Winds and water then attacked these fins until the cementing material in some gave way and chunks of rock tumbled out.  Many of these damaged fins collapsed.  Others, harder and better balanced, survived despite missing sections.  These became the famous arches...This is Arches National Park's geologic story -- probably.  The evidence is largely circumstantial.

   The section of the park called Windows gave a capsule-like version of the arches in formation, the tall cliffs branching out like trees overhead and forming a giant canopy under which you could walk with ease.  Nearby were the arches' infant beginnings, some pieces just breaking away and others appearing to be readying themselves to be the star attractions of the next geologic generation, a time perhaps dozens of centuries hence when the tall rocks would weaken and fall and give way to something entirely new.  Before us stood double and triple arches, some quite large and others just barely letting through a sliver of light, each so close to view that even buses full of elderly tourists could scamper over the short flat trail and stand underneath the spans towering above them.  It was as if we were caught in a bubbling pot of geology, a quick glance around giving everyone a history lesson, one frozen in time and yet one constantly evolving.  The time frame and size of the stone arches were simply beyond our comprehension for here was geological progression...but as the brochure said, probably.

   A short mile or so down the road brought us to Park Avenue and The Courthouse Towers sections of the park, sheer and seemingly unscalable walls that left early park explorers with only those sky scraping names to describe them.  It was as if one were viewing a parting of a solidified Red Sea, hidden walls of rock or what was left of them frozen at their tallest height.  The beauty before us was presenting us something vastly different from its original layers eons ago, a rock layer which was likely half eroded, blown or washed away as dust or sand over eons.  Oceans of other rock, a mile thick, created an entirely different view millions of years ago, one that could have been "an endless flat plain dotted with vegetation," as the park brochure speculated.  Imagine a visit far into the future, when these layers have fully worn away.  What new rock shapes might you discover then?, it continued.  Adding to all of this, and somehow stirring my memory of those early railroad tracks, I pondered the challenge on building the trials and the well-maintained roads that lined the park.  Where to carve steps, where to place public bathrooms, where to make turnouts?  It all seems easy now that it's mostly completed but at the time, staring over such a vast expanse, it must have been a daunting challenge for early park planners and yet one which has benefited so many, a selfless example of "for the common good."

   But it was time for us to move on, for just a few hours away and nearly 100 million years later, a new group of shale and sandstone had arrived, and with it the humans who would be taking advantage of the water that dripped through the sandstone and was stopped by the impermeable shale, a process that left eroded cliff faces with caves and left somewhat fertile valleys below.  It would turn out to be a place to build a community, a place to discover that water could be captured in other ways and that clay, not yucca strands could be formed into pots (the yucca was plentiful in the area and the strands woven so tightly that the containers made with the fibers could easily hold water without any leakage).  It was to be a new era, another movement of the earth's history and one destined to bury the past.  It became in geologic terms, the Masaverde Group, and it would turn the area into the largest human inhabited cliff dwellings in North America.  And it would all be built hundreds of feet above ground in the sheer cliffs that dotted the landscape.  It was difficult to imagine, as if what was waiting for us a few hours away would be similar to us suddenly looking up at these giant arches and seeing an entire community at work at their tops.  The people were long gone and with them, their memories of what it all must have looked like when this land had no roads or railroad tracks, perhaps even no access.  It was a microcosm of us, and of cities such as Moab.  Keep things as they are or move on and change?  Adapt to a blending of the two or just try to survive and see what happens?  For the land, there was little to decide for it operated on a different time scale, a process slower that the liquified salt that once flowed underneath.  We were off to Mesa Verde.

The Park Avenue section, one of the first sights upon entering Arches