Two thousand arches!

On my first weekend since beginning work at Hovenweep, I took off for Moab, UT (a 2 1/2 hour drive away).  Moab is a great little city surrounded by beautiful red rock cliffs, and is just minutes from Arches National Park, one of the most-visited in the country.  It's famous for housing over two thousand natural sandstone arches--defined as any opening at least three feet in diameter, though many are much larger.

I stayed for three days with a fellow SCA intern who is working this summer at Arches, which gave me time to explore all sorts of incredible things in the park.  I saw some of the famous sites like Balanced Rock and Delicate Arch, and also hike out to less-traveled areas like the "Devil's Garden," where you'll find Double-O Arch.  But the best way to describe all of this, of course, is in pictures!

Balanced Rock

  

A rainbow at Delicate Arch just before sunset

 

The "Three Gossips" at sunset

Double Arch, one of my favorites

Most arches--and other really interesting rock shapes--are formed in the Entrada Sandstone, a layer of sedimentary rock deposited about 200 to 150 million years ago.  (A reference point for any Questers: the Entrada layer is just above the Carmel Formation, which is above the Navajo Sandstone, the highest-up and latest-deposited layer we encountered very much of on the Green River.  So this Entrada sandstone is somewhat younger.)

Now, one thing that's been difficult for me is to get any pictures of myself on my adventures, as I'm traveling alone.  The secret solution?  Pick a guy who's carrying around a big fancy camera, and ask him to take a picture of you!

At the South Window.

Arches is a huge park, and there are even more interesting things to do there besides look at arches.  One is to take a tour of the "Fiery Furnace," an incredible maze of sandstone "fins," out of which arches are formed once water or wind erosion pokes a hole in them.  The fins are formed from the weathering away of sandstone around cracks made in the rock as the earth shifts over hundreds of years.

The Fiery Furnace

There's a joke among the rangers at Arches that "the Fiery Furnace is full of rainbows and unicorns" because they have to deal with a large number of visitors whining and screaming about not being allowed to go in.  Only a small number are allowed to enter each day, and only on ranger-guided tours, because it's a place where you could easily get lost wandering through the thin openings in the rocks if you don't know exactly where you're going.  The tours are often booked weeks ahead of time, so people who wait until the day they arrive to demand entrance into this area of the park are almost always disappointed.  Very lucky for me, a tour on the Monday I was there had openings!  And because I am an SCA at a nearby park, I am both automatically well-connected and taken pity on because I make only $75 a week.  So I got to go into the Fiery Furnace for free :)

Descending into the Fiery Furnace

Coming up on Surprise Arch--wow!

And that's only a small slice of what I got to see and do on my weekend at Arches National Park, but this is getting quite long, so I'll sign off with a few more of my favorite photos.

Landscape Arch at sunrise--290 feet across!

Double-O Arch: two arches stacked on top of each other!

An excellent example of "fins"

"Lasagna Rock" as a thunderstorm rolls in.
I just made up that name because I was so fond of this rock,
but the Dewey Bridge member of the Carmel Formation,
from which it is formed, is sometimes called the "lasagna layer"

Sunset behind sagebrush,  a plant you grow to love
if you spend enough time out in the desert.