Day 17: Friday, May 28th, 2004

Delicate Arch

By Tess Passey

We left Canyonlands with all twelve of us and no helicopters and destroyed careers and headed toward Arches. It was a pretty short drive, and we got to Moab, Utah for lunch at a Mexican restaurant. We mosied toward Arches, with a long stop at the visitor’s center where we almost cleaned them out of geological cross-section posters and made the beautiful eighteen-mile drive to our campsite there. That eighteen-mile drive, by the way, was never the same scene – we drove that first time in daylight, the next as the sun was setting, back again when it was very dark, and the last time out it was raining. It was beautiful every time.
On the first drive we stopped on the road just past the visitor’s center to see the Moab fault across the highway. We were looking at the down-dropped sheet that moved as a result of fresh water leaking into the salt deposits below the surface, which caused the salt to dissolve and the overlying layers collapsed down.
We also stopped at the walk around Balanced Rock – the cap rock of the Slick Rock member of the Entrada sandstone perched on the Dewey Bridge mudstone member. Balanced Rock is quite large, roughly the size of three industrial dumpsters, or two Ford Excursions. We noticed the deformation of the Dewey Bridge member, and are not convinced that it is soft-sediment deformation. The tight, expansive, curved layers seemed to point to structural deformation, but we didn’t examine our speculation further.
We were all very tired after the long celebratory night at Canyonlands, so we set up camp and relaxed for an hour or so. After our rest, we took the quick, one-hour hike to Delicate Arch. That hike is great, mostly flat with one nice long, steep scramble over sandstone with an awesome view of the La Sal Mountains and the amazing green shale. The arch sneaks up on you just around a corner and is breathtaking – so tall and fragile-looking, on the edge of a huge carved-out ampitheater-like rock. It was a little scary traversing the bowl-shaped stone to the edge where the arch stood because it was extremely windy, even more daunting standing under the arch. We stayed for a fifteen or twenty minutes, then hustled back to the vans before it could start raining on us.
We stopped at the campsite before heading to Moab for dinner to find one of the tents had flown ten feet away from its original staked location. We must have figured it was because there was no gear inside the tent, because no precautions were taken to further fix all the tents to their places before making the stunning sunset drive out of Arches. Upon returning from a Chinese dinner, an attempted (and failed) viewing of the global-warming disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” and an ice-cream stop, we found all tents (except Ron’s) blown 40 feet away, lodged in bushes and trees. We re-staked and made our way to our sleeping bags for the night.