None of us had been to Arches National Park before, but we'd seen plenty of pictures. Apparently, the reddish-orange cartoon-looking arch on the Utah license plate is one of the arches in the park (which, when we saw it in person, we all felt was a huge disappointment and grossly misrepresented on the license plate).
We drove through the park in awe, heads glued to the car windows (it was already hot) as we determined where to stop and maximize the experience in the limited amount of time we had.
There was a Japanese tour bus just ahead of us at each stop, and the babbling chaos that brought to the scene diminished the quality of our experience. But it was astounding nonetheless. What was also astounding was how stupid people can be. Walking back down one path, we passed a park ranger coming up. She stopped us briefly and said she had reports of people walking
on top of one of the arches and asked if that was true. It was. She grimly continued on to do her best to prevent a stupid death or two. But that foolhardiness was nothing compared to what we saw people doing at the Grand Canyon (yet to come).
We learned about desert varnish (the black stain on the rocks) and tried to wrap our brains around the mainstream scientists' explanations of how this landscape came to be (deposition, uplift, erosion multiplied over hundreds of millions of years) and we just couldn't grasp it. To us, all we saw (and continued to see in the coming days) just screamed evidence of a catastrophic flood.
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| These tall rock structures reminded us of sentinels, guarding the park |
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| Aptly named "Balanced Rock" |
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| The colors, layers, and structures of the surrounding country was majestic |
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| Several storms could be seen in different areas; here, Justin is admiring the view |
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| One of the infamous arches |
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| This, folks, is the arch on the Utah license plate. Yup, we were disappointed too. |
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