Jane & Colin: Arches National Park

Arches, the closest park to Moab, was designated a National Monument in 1929. We asked ourselves how could this one be much different from other National Parks we’ve seen. The theme is rock formations and arches, hence the name. The scene is set soon after the entrance. The freestanding rock pillar in the center is several hundred feet tall.

Some pillars could have been deliberately carved into recognisible shapes. This one is called The Sheep.

Size is sometimes difficult to appreciate in photos. Balanced Rock, as it is called, is the size of three school buses and weighs an estimated 3,500 tonnes. That’s not cement, by the way, keeping it in place, but a different strata of rock. There are many other examples of precariously balanced boulders.

So let’s now look at some arches. This is Double Arch with a span of 148 feet. You may pick out tiny figures that are people going to and from the arch.

North and South Windows resemble a pair of spectacles. Bit heavy on the nose perhaps.

Worth a second glance are the fantastic shapes of the ancient dead juniper trees. Navajo Indians collect and dry juniper berries from living trees to make necklaces.

The arches are all sorts of strange shapes. This is turret arch, with a waving figure in the background to give an idea of scale.

The oddest arch is Delicate Arch. It looks like the bottom half of a body, and is 60 feet tall. Some arches are genuinely precarious: in 2008 one fell.

There are a staggering 2,000 plus arches altogether, The previous photos show some of the more notable ones, but we didn’t have the time and energy to find the biggest. Landscape Arch is in a more remote part and is the world’s largest at 290 feet span.

No-one lives in the park because no-one is permitted to in any National Park, other than those essential for running the parks. But before 1929 there were a inhabitants were drawn to this wilderness. Here is Jane outside her dream home, the ex residence of a Mr Wolfe.

John Wolfe left his wife and children in Ohio and journeyed west with his eldest son in 1898. They settled in this valley and built a cabin, eking out a living by subsistence farming. A daughter came in 1906 and was appalled by their primitive living conditions. She insisted they build a new cabin with a wooden floor. This is the upgraded cabin- so what must the predecessor have been like!

Other past dwellers include the Ute Indians who left some animal rock etchings near the Wolfe ranch. The experts say that these were carried out some time between 1650 and 1850.

At one pull-in we watched the antics of a raven on the back of the truck in front. He dived into the back clearly looking for food. It pays dividends: a chap told us he’d seen a pair of ravens a few days earlier find and devour a packet of crisps, a bag of Gummy Worms (jelly babies) and an apple. Smart birds.