Delicate Arch

  

I was up in the dark this morning, heading for Arches National Park, just a ten-minute drive north of Moab, to the pay station which was closed, and another twenty minutes to the trailhead.  I wanted to complete the two mile hike to Delicate arch in time for sunrise.  

 

The morning air is dry and clear and cool, perfect for hiking.  I arrive before the rays of the sun first strike the cliffs, my camera clicking before it happened.  Suddenly it comes, the flaming globe, blazing on the pinnacles and minarets and balanced rocks, and touching the top of the arch for which The Arches are famous.  All of the next pictures show Delicate Arch from different angles as the sun was rising.

.

I walked back to the road over this trail, and came in again on the other side to view Delicate Arch from across the deep Winter Camp Wash.

.

I returned from Arches National Park around noon and found myself facing a gush of cars, RV’s and motorcycles coming in.  Early this morning I had seen nobody.  Edward Abby, writer of “Desert Solitaire” would be unhappy to see his worst fear become reality.  As a park ranger here in the fifties, he did all he could to stop mechanized tourism, which he said was ruining the parks.  At least there are solitary places to hike.

Tourists

I spent these last two days in and near Moab, settling into ordiary activities of a tourist.  I joined likeminded travelers at the Jailhouse Café, where they arrived in RV’s, SUV’s, jeeps, and cars with mountain bicycles high on their tops.  They came on motorcycles or pulling trailers loaded with ATV’s and river rafts.  

No longer is Moab a hub for cowboys and uranium prospectors.  The Ute Indians have left, and the Mormon missionaries have withdrawn into their private places and even allow hard liquor.  Today Moab serves tourists at a profit.  No other town is so well located that visitors can reach three national parks, each on a day trip.  (Canyonlands is really two parks, unjoined by any road.)

 

They file into the Jailhouse Café in litters spaced 1.5 years apart, in heights of 4.5’, 4’, 3’, and 2’ all in matching T-shirts.  Two families come in together and ask for a table for twelve.  I sit surprised at how well they and their young parents behave away from home.  They will circle the parks of Utah, ten parks in two weeks, stopping in Moab for perhaps three days.  I join them, well behaved and polite as I know how in the Jailhouse.  

.

Last evening I did the expected of a tourist—an evening cruise on the Colorado River.  A man narrated the sights along the banks, pointing out faces in the vertical rock walls, which we can recognize with only a little imagination.  Our brains seem best with faces.  We can recognize a face in almost any configuration of rock if we stare long enough.  Kids on the boat were finding them unassisted, while I was seeing buffalos, elk, and mac trucks in the same rock.

.

I did another sane and near-tourist thing today in riding the Moab Valley Bicycle Path, an uphill journey through red rock on a paved trail completely free from cars.  There I took pictures of sandstone, which you can see above in horizontal layers where it settled to the bottom of a great sea some twenty million years ago.

This sandstone is not in horizontal layers.  It was deposited by wind in the form of sand dunes.  So how did an ocean and dry sand get placed one on top of the other?  Well, the tectonic plate moved both hundreds of miles horizontally and thousands of feet vertically, and did so several times.  Inconceivable!  Yet all the fossils and other evidence point to a conclusion of unimaginable time in which deposition and erosion slowly created what I see by simply looking at these rocks.

Druid Arch

Yesterday I left you in the setting sun, crawled into my sack and went to sleep.  Above, hung the half-moon, dimly illuminating the rocks above my camp.  So utterly silent was the night that every scratch of rodant, every far away hoo-hoo of owl, every howl of coyote came inside my little tent to awake me until I learned to ignore them.  Something about a long stiff climb makes a meager meal and strange night sounds seem just right.

At some point in the darkness, after the moon had gone down, I came out of the tent and nearly fell over from a squat when I saw the sky burning with glittering stars, rich and frosty.  The sky was just as full of ancient portent as the rocks I had pondered the meanings of yesterday.  Fortunately, we now have telescopes that relieve us of assigning godly names and worshipful accolades to the stars, but it’s easy to see, on a dark night, how the Anasazi could.

 

In the morning I left most of my ger behind and carried only essentials for the up-and-back climb.  Elephant Canyon narrowed and steepened as I followed it deeper into the Needles, rock walls closing together on the sides, and in one place, Big Bird looking down.

 

In this picture, a rock appears to have been place precariously on a column of sandstone.  It is one of the Needles.  But geologists think that a very long ago, a great inland sea collected sand grains from rivers flowing into it.  The grains hardened into rock; the land rose; the sea disappeared.  Then came a long stage of erosion when the harder layers (like the rock on top of this needle) resisted rainfall better than the layers under it.  This is why the Colorado river is muddy, carrying all this erosion to another ocean, which might become another Canyonland.  It’s an incredible-sounding scenario.

.

I see what looks like another needle ahead and wonder if I am close to the heart of the Needles.

Looking back down the trail, I see the cairns that mark the way I have come.  “Trail” is the wrong word here.  It is simply a matter of finding a way to the next cairn.  Sometimes I try several routes before finding one that works.

The apparent needle is closer now.

Now the “needle” takies on a different shape.

After ascending through a crack and climbing over some huge boulders, I suddenly come upon a spectacle that takes my breath away.  Druid Arch.  Pictures cannot address the grandeur of this place.  It is like a cathedral lined with vertical walls and spires, and in its center, the massive Druid Arch.  It looked like a needle as I climbed toward it, viewing it on edge, but in this view it dazzles the imagination.

Heart of the Needles

At the top of my last post, you can still see a picture of The Needles in Canyonlands National Park, taken from miles away.  I had heard that within that labyrinth of canyons and sandstone spires, lie the most magnificent of all rock formations in Canyonlands.  It’s accessible only by a long rough trail, they say, a difficult rock scramble, with no water along the way.  A permit is required, relieving the government of responsibility, while they tell me the rules and dangers.

So it was that yesterday morning I parked at the trailhead and proceeded with two gallons of water, enough for two days, food, tent, and sleeping bag.  I would penetrate the depths of wonderland to its magnificent heart.  

 

A penguin peers down from an iceberg, wondering what I am doing at midday walking in such a hot place.  He’s been here so long his feathers have fallen off and hasn’t noticed the loss.  

 

A gargoyle, designed to ward off evil spirits, juts out from a cathedral wall.  So easily the builders assign spiritual significance to objects in the natural world and reform them for liturgical purpose.

 

Across Elephant Canyon from where I set up camp, Grumpy stands high and proud, sharing his despondence with all who pass here.

.













.


This whole Needles maze seems inhabited by rare, senescent creatures, frozen hard and cunning.  It’s beyond my ability to grasp or utilize a power that seems innate in the ancient and elemental rocks that surround me.  What wonders lie in the vast beyond, the millions of years these forms have been in the making.  Here before me are bare skeletons of Being, austere, motionless, silent, carrying veils of old mystery.  It evokes in me an elusive hint of something unknown, maybe unknowable, but wanting to be revealed.  Am I confusing the thing observed with the mind of the observer?  Am I painting a word picture of external reality, or is it simply a mirror of the thinker?  Maybe these new and stunning rocks have stumbled me into the audacious error of separating the observer from the thing observed. 

 I will not give you the destination of the last two days, (it’s getting late now), but will delay your gratification until tomorrow night after a day of relative ease exploring the town of Moab.

These last pictures are taken from my camp as the blazing sun settled over the canyon wall, its increasingly red rays mixing with red and white sandstone giants.  

.

.



.

The First Day

Two hours before the approaching sunrise, the alarm shook me out of sleep.  On the first of my twenty-one mornings among rocks of Utah, I wanted the best light, and that would come at dawn I was told.  I made the seventy-mile drive into the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park before those first enhancing rays struck the cliffs.  Highway 191, then 211, all in darkness until the last twenty miles when red and white ghosts began appearing, taking on the forms of faces, loaves of bread, choirs.  

I park at the trailhead and start out in dry cool air.  And when I stop, there is not a single sound, nothing—silence.  Suddenly it comes, the flaming globe, blazing on the pinnacles and minarets and balanced rocks, not gradually but with a burst of light.  I must be Eve on the first day of creation, it seemed, in full knowledge that millions of days have preceded me.

Livening and brightening in color and texture with every minute of the sun’s climbing, the rocks seemed animated with changing character.  My camera snapped and snapped, but soon I realized I had risen too early.  The formations are more vivid a half-hour to an hour after sunrise than at that moment of bright burst.

 

The trail is mostly on slickrock, a whitish sandstone with many potholes that fill with water during storms.  Then, I am told, the spadefoot toads come to life, having lived through the dry spells in a state of estivation in dry sediment in the bottom of the hole.  There they wait, patient, perhaps listening for the sound of raindrops pattering at last above their heads.  But today the potholes are dry with dirt in their bottoms.  I follow these rock cairns which mark the trail.

Placements of decorative rock, esthetically chosen, by Chinese no doubt.

It looks like dirt but it’s a living system of plants and animals, a community getting by in a dry hot place.  To walk here is to bomb the kibbutz. 

A giant has passed this way leaving us his shoe.  Guess he knew no one would take it.

.

.

.

 Tomorrow morning I will shoulder a backpack with two gallons of water, tent and sleeping bag for an overnight stay in a waiting canyon near Druid Arch, deep in the Needles.  You will not hear from me tomorrow night.

A Long Journey in Rock

“ They set out from Oboth and camped in Iye Abarim, in the wilderness that faces Moab toward the sunrise. . . .the slopes of the ravines that lead to the settlement of Ar and lie along the border of Moab. . . . “Fire went out from Heshbon, a blaze from the city of Sihon.  It consumed Ar of Moab.” –Numbers 21

Now that I’m in Moab, The journey along I-70 getting here seems too beautiful to match in all my anticipated hiking.  See here some of what I saw today.

Santa Fe at 7,000 feet and central Utah at the same elevation, their piñon pines look the same.

Behind their whitewashed nooks a monster lurks, just the way they knew it would.

Home is where you find it or build it or set up its pole.  It’s where the storms can't get, most of the time.

Good cross ventilation is the earmark of all desert dwellings.

Landing gear still in place, the petrified giant rests near other Anasazi ruins.

Many caves between Pakistan and Afghanistan, between California and New Mexico, many places to hide.