Happy Birthday to my first born, Scott.

Today we got an early start because we had to drive from Salt Lake City to Moab, UT and see Arches National Park all in one day. It all worked out great, because Arches is a half day park. We left at 8:10 and 68 degrees and turned the car south. Driving through the Salt Lake City area pains me. Salt Lake City is located right in the middle of the most incredible mountains. The vista are fabulous, or they would be but for the power lines, light poles, billboards, road signs, and overpasses. I know that a lot of this is necessary, but billboards? (Maine outlawed billboards back in the 1960's and has thus provided a much nicer travel experience for millions of people.) I struggled to take photos of the early morning mountains, shrouded in a haze and backlit by the early morning sun, but I failed miserably. Every shot had clutter in it. And I came to the conclusion that the people who live with such incredible scenery on a daily basis must become immune to its beauty, otherwise they would find a way to keep it unsullied. I guess they just don’t care. And I find that very sad.

After leaving Salt Lake City, we drove for about four hours through mountains and dessert, and the vistas were incredible. The mesas, oh the mesas…they rise from the flat dessert floor, parched and cracked like a dried river bed, where even the sage has a difficult time thriving. The mesas, sometimes in earth tone shades of browns and tans and sometimes a brilliant brick red, rise proudly with crowns of stone like jewels against the bright blue sky. (How could anyone even think of putting power lines in front of these gems?)

We got to Arches just after noon. After entering the park, we parked the car and had lunch as we studied the map and decided on a plan of attack. The park is made up of the most beautiful rock formations in red and orange. Here is a snippet from the park pamphlet:

"The park lies atop an underground salt bed that is responsible for the arches, spires, balanced rocks, sandstone fins and eroded monoliths of this mecca for sightseers. Thousands of feet thick in places, this salt bed was deposited across the Colorado Plateau 300 million years ago when a sea flowed into the region and eventually evaporated. Over millions of years, residue from floods, winds, and the oceans that came and went blanketed the salt bed. The debris was compressed as rock, at one time possibly a mile thick. Salt under pressure is unstable, and the salt bed lying below Arches was no match for the weight of this thick cover of rock. The salt layer shifted, buckled, liquefied, and repositioned itself, thrusting the rock layers upwards as domes, and whole sections fell into the cavities."

The result is huge, and I mean huge, structures in various shapes projecting from the dessert floor like monuments to the Gods. The park is named for the multiple arches formed in this process. These arches are not always easy to view. They frequently require a hike of from half a mile to 4 miles to get close to them. I am not going to attempt to describe them, I am simply going to post photos. Just keep in mind that these structures are HUGE.

We got back to our hotel by 4 PM and settled in to plan the next few days.   Tomorrow, Canyonlands National Park.