Arches is perhaps the most appropriately named National Park in the United States given that it is home to dozens and dozens of natural arches. The natural arch is a bewildering phenomenon and one that, at least in my eyes, rarely gets old. I have seen plenty of sea-bound arches in my time but these sandstone arches are something else entirely. Created by water and ice, which are not exactly abundant in the high desert, and sculpted by wind, the bright ochre formations come in a myriad of shapes and sizes, each unique in its own way, each telling a story on the scale of millions of years.
Arches is a brilliant place. It has one of the best scenic drives I’ve come across with a feast for the eyes, plenty of great outlooks if you are the scenic viewpoint seeker, and several fun and challenging hikes for adventurous souls. It is one of the more accessible parks as well, its entrance only minutes from Moab and the road ascending the initial plateau relatively light in its curves and grades. I entered the park on my first day there just a few minutes after dawn as the sun peeked over slightly drizzly rain clouds. My first destination was the most famous arch of them all: Delicate Arch, found on Utah’s license plate.
Black Canyon and Mesa Verde were light on hiking so this was my first true physical exertion of the trip. The trail itself up to Delicate Arch is straightforward, a moderate ascent with some parts that might be tricky in hot and sandy weather. An overcast morning like the one that met me on the trailhead is the perfect condition and I found myself quickly moving up my gears as I traversed a few minor switchbacks and the sandstone slopes. I am a fast hiker, with purpose and intent imbuing my physical self with determination, but I never cease to take in my surroundings, sometimes to my detriment as despite my experience I am quite adept at losing the trail. While the culmination of this hike is the arch, there is plenty of scenery for the eyes to chew on as the ascent opens up views of the vastness of the park below.
A first look at Delicate Arch and one can’t help but think: oh, it’s an arch, is there anything else around here? But let your eyes linger and it soon becomes evident why it is so famous. It does not seem particularly delicate except there are certain points and angles where it seems to shimmer. The effect is mysterious but captivating and I soon found myself unable to keep my eyes off of the arch as I walked around the bluff, taking in its elusive delicateness from different angles. It helps to go early in the morning to avoid the hordes of people erupting from tour buses. There is a peacefulness to the arch that transcended even the loud and obnoxious yapping of some young whippersnappers.
Delicate Arch is one of many delights in the park. My next stop was a short canyon called Park Avenue whose rock formations rivaled the marvels of other parts of Utah and Arizona. A short out-and-back hike, I was surprised at how few people were on the trail. It has no arches but it is a beautiful and massive place accessible through a fairly easy hike. I ran into a few more people on my way back to the trailhead, including a group of children who had outpaced their guardians and had turned almost feral with the joy and freedom of their surroundings. (I saw some of these same children at a later stop, exhausted and hungry, crying their lungs out, as their pregnant mother told them basically to suck it up as the first order of business was a bathroom break for her. The level of her equanimity was impressive.)
I finished off the morning with a jaunt around Double Arch (true to its name) and the appropriately-named Windows Arches. I usually do my hiking trips in off-seasons to beat the crowds but even so the parking lot was jam-packed with a longish line waiting for parking spots. I can’t imagine how long those lines would be in the high season. I of course tapped into my multi-ethnic identity, calling upon the driving and parking culture of my Turkish forebears by casually entering a Do Not Enter lane to access a bit of space by the side of the road. I have no compunctions. I gifted myself the liberty of time, as I visited all of the arches on that stop and made it back to town for lunch at a reasonable hour.
After having a spicy chicken shawarma wrap for lunch, which while rather good was actually a horrible idea ahead of a major hike, I headed back to Arches and the northernmost point open to the public. The Devil’s Garden trail is one of the most fun hikes I’ve ever done though I admittedly only did an out-and-back to Double-O Arch instead of the full loop. By the time I reached the Double-O, I had already done more than ten miles that day and I didn’t have the legs to do another six. But the challenge of the primitive trail that starts a mile or so after the trailhead for both the ascent and the descent is so incredibly enjoyable that I have no regrets.
After a fairly vanilla jaunt up to Landscape Arch, most of the crowd turns back instead of continuing on a primitive trail that scrambles up and down steep rock walls, takes detours to lightly-visited arches (like Partition Arch, which might have been my favorite one in the whole park), tightropes across narrow crags, and pauses briefly in a remote corner, far from the madding crowds, where the Double-O arch sits in wild isolation. This is where I turned back and the return was just as enjoyable, especially the descent on the final slope that required me to contort my body into strange shapes as I cautiously inched my way down. A stranger rewarded me with a fist bump for my efforts.
It was a day where I clocked over fourteen miles of steps according to my phone’s gyroscope but my adventures at Arches were far from over. I had hoped to return at night to gaze on the starry heavens but a waning gibbous moon and cloudy skies put paid to that plan. However, I was back in the morning for a ranger-led tour into the Fiery Furnace, a daunting name if ever there was one (though fiery kept transmuting to furry in my mind, which is even more horrifying). The name was given to the area by Mormon pioneers in the 18th century in homage to the deep red and orange glows of the rocks on a sunny day. I wonder sometimes if a sign of the waning creativity of modern humankind, with lives made more convenient and more dependent on technology, is the decline of inspired name-making. We tend to name our places and structures after people and companies and the result is boringly unimpressive. See my thoughts on English football stadium names for a longer digression this idea.
The hike itself was a lot of fun, in keeping with every hike I had done so far at the park. I’m glad I did the ranger-led one. For all of my experience as a hiker, I am terrible at finding a path. I’ve lost myself multiple times, once on a trail just outside Charlottesville I’d done dozens of times and feared running into bears (I did not), another time in the high desert in Grand Escalante where the All Trails app probably saved my life as I was walking in the complete opposite direction I should have been. The hike included quite a bit of scrambling, a couple of times requiring five points of contact (the fifth, upon questioning the ranger, turned out to be the posterior) and a few times of sliding down slopes with the foot-brake technique. We did have to endure a lecture by our ranger because two members of the group stayed behind to take pictures, requiring her to backtrack, but otherwise it was a lovely experience that included a brief discussion of wonder underneath the span of Surprise Arch.
On our return, an older lady in the group gave me a punch in the shoulder and thanked me for being so entertaining on the hike. Her full-grown children looked at me with rolled eyes. But I’m glad at least some souls in this world appreciate my humor and sharp observations. For some reason, it reminded me of the sixth grade, where my school, which no longer exists, put on a costume show where we all dressed up as popular characters. I must have been particularly boring as I ended up being Forrest Gump, whose costume is so nondescript, and I just ran in place on stage with nary a chuckle to be found amongst the crowd. It was a pretty traumatizing experience. I wonder what an AI therapist would think of it. But look how much I’ve grown now that I am effortlessly entertaining people on remote country hikes. Who’s laughing now?
And thus I ended my day-and-a-half at Arches, so full, so very, very full of life and adventure and contemplation. My next stop was just next door at the vast expanse of awe-inspiring tableaus that is Canyonlands National Park.