Arches National Park

We left just before dawn to make up lost time, talk about cold!  It’s not just the heat you have to worry about in the desert, the hr just before sunup is ungodly cold too.   We ended up having to miss both Canyonlands and Dead Horse St Park.  Oddly every time I’ve been this way I’ve ended up missing Canyonlands for one reason or another,  mostly because its 40 miles off the highway in the middle of nowhere just to get to the front gate or someone in the group having severe allergies and us having to flee the area asap.

On to Arches..  Again..  I’ve been here many times before, Cece hadn’t.  Its nice because you can see most of it without leaving the road if you want to and then theres lots of trails if you do want to get out and get up close.

This aerial photo inside the museum explains how all these arches and formations form.  The surface starts out as flat sandstone and cracks in parallel lines.

Then it erodes down to these cool parallel vertical sections

Water freezing and thawing chips away the bottoms of them at ground level, you can see some of the flakes that are gone in this one in the lower corner.

Eventually you end up with something like this

and this.

This is a continual ongoing process making Arches National Park a very dynamic and constantly changing landscape, sometimes with very dramatic quick changes.  These historic pictures show how Skyline Arch (the very top photo) has grown and changed over time, doubling in size overnight as a boulder fell away.

The Park is home to several kinds of large animals, unfortunately we didnt get to see any and I don’t think the wild ones would pose so nicely for photos like these statues at the visitors center.

Cece Lizard Whisperer!     We did see many kinds of birds and a few species of lizards, small..

Some jagged and broken boulders we had to hike over that look like they’d be a better fit on the surface of Mars than amongst the smooth sandstone formations.

Just some random photography from Arches.