BGuthrie Photos: UT -- Arches Natl Park

UT -- Arches Natl Park:

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. ARCH_160716_013.JPG: Long line to get in
2. ARCH_160716_060.JPG: Moab Fault: A dramatic break in the earth's surface occurred here about six million years ago. Under intense pressure, unable to stretch, the crust cracked and shifted. Today, the highway parallels this fracture line, called the Moab Fault. After the rock layers shifted, the east wall of the canyon where you are standing ended up more than 2,600 feet lower than the west side (across the highway).
3. ARCH_160716_076.JPG: Rock climber hooks
4. ARCH_160716_132.JPG: Landmarks on the Landscape The clean, clear air of this region often permits high visibility. The La Sal Mountains are about 20 miles (32 km) away, and rise to over 12,000 feet (3640 meters) in elevation.
5. ARCH_160716_142.JPG: Landmarks on the Landscape: Almost everything that you can see here is within the boundaries of Arches National Park, except the distant cliffs. Balanced Rock is about five miles (8 km) ahead.
6. ARCH_160716_199.JPG: The Rise and Fall of an Arch: Like Living Things, arches have life cycles, too. Starting as small holes in rock faces, they enlarge and eventually collapse from weathering and erosion. Water, whether from rain or snow, dissolves the natural cement (calcium carbonate) in the Entrada Sandstone. Sand grains once "glued" together as rock are separated and washed away, arches form, grow, mature and fall. Although there are no major arches here at Courthouse Towers, the cycle is continuing. Look for Baby Arch in the rock wall to the left of Sheep Rock. Weathering over time will enlarge this growing arch until it finally collapses.
7. ARCH_160716_245.JPG: Ancient Sand Dunes: This vast area was once covered by extensive sand dunes. Some 200 million years ago, winds from the northwest carried tons of fine-grained sand into this area, creating an immense desert. Over time, the sand drifts were covered by other layers of sediment, compressed, and cemented by quartz and calcite into Navajo Sandstone. Erosion has since washed away the overlying layers, exposing the "petrified" dunes.
8. ARCH_160716_309.JPG: Balanced Rock: The forces of erosion are sculpting more than just arches. Balanced Rock clearly shows the various layers responsible for this amazing defiance of gravity. The caprock of the hard Slick Rock Member of the Entrada Sandstone is perched upon a pedestal of mudstone. This softer Dewey Bridge Member of the Carmel Formation weathers more quickly than the resistant rock above. Eventually, the faster-eroding Dewey Bridge will cause the collapse of Balanced Rock. Throughout the park, you can see other balanced rocks, spires, and pinnacles that form as different rock layers erode at different rates. The size of Balanced Rock can be deceiving. Take a short lop trail (0.2 miles; 0.3 kilometers) for a closer look.
9. ARCH_160716_410.JPG: Name That Rock: Have you been seeing things in the rocks? Some people have found a parade of elephants, a ham, a turret, spectacles, and the Garden of Eden. Naturally eroded features of Arches National Park inspire the imagination of today's visitors just as they did in the 1920s and 1930s, when Arches was first mapped. The origin of many place names will never be known, but others can be traced to early miners, journalists, photographers, and former Arches superintendent Bates Wilson. What tempts the human mind to find familiar shapes in the rocks? Is it a need to make sense of this weird jumbled landscape? Is it the joy of creativity or just pure playfulness? Whatever the reason, people have been seeing everything from the mundane to paradise in these landforms for around a century. What creatures or objects do you see sculpted in the sandstone by water and time. Name your rock!
10. ARCH_160716_414.JPG: Double Arch Trail
11. ARCH_160716_416.JPG: Double Arch At Double Arch, three major openings are enlarging side by side. They all began as one pothole arch.
12. ARCH_160716_423.JPG: Pothole Arch Formation: Pothole arches start as depressions near cliff face. Pools of water collect the slowly deepen the pothole. Over time, water seeps through the cliff face, forming an alcove. Eventually, the enlarging pothole meets the roof of the expanding alcove, creating an opening. The arch matures as erosion continues.
13. ARCH_160716_539.JPG: Salt Valley: Beneath the valley floor in front of you lies a thick layer of salt. Formed by the evaporation of ancient oceans, the salt became thousands of feet deep. Over the next 200 million years, this salt was buried by sand, silt, and other sediments. Under pressure, the less dense salt rose into a dome, partly dissolved, and then collapsed, creating Salt Valley.
14. ARCH_160716_571.JPG: Delicate Arch Viewpoint Trails
15. ARCH_160716_585.JPG: Delicate Arch: Carved in Entrada Sandstone, this free-standing arch is composed mostly of the Slick Rock Member. The top is a five-foot thick layer of Moab Tongue. A remnant of an ancient fin, the arch today has an opening of 45 feet (13.7 meters) high and 33 feet (10 meters) wide. Water and time have sculpted Delicate Arch, and erosion continues to slowly wear away the features of this mature span. Although it will eventually succumb to the same forces that created it, this majestic arch now stands as an iconic feature of the American West.
16. ARCH_160716_641.JPG: Skyline Arch Arches usually form slowly, but quick and dramatic changes do occur. In 1940, a large boulder suddenly fell out of Skyline Arch, roughly doubling the size of the opening.
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: Arches National Park
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arches National Park preserves over 2,000 natural sandstone arches, including the world-famous Delicate Arch, in addition to a variety of unique geological resources and formations.

The park is located near Moab, Utah, and is 119 square miles (309 km�) in size. Its highest elevation is 5,653 feet (1,723 m) at Elephant Butte and its lowest elevation is 4,085 feet (1,245 m) at the visitor center. Since 1970, 42 arches have toppled because of erosion. Arches National Park receives 10 inches (250 mm) of rain a year on average.

The area, administered by the National Park Service, was originally designated as a national monument on April 12, 1929. It was redesignated a national park on November 12, 1971. More than 833,000 people visited it in 2006.

Features:

Among the notable features of the park are:

* Delicate Arch — a lone-standing arch which has become a symbol of Utah
* Balanced Rock — a large balancing rock, the size of three school buses
* Double Arch — two arches, one on top of the other
* Landscape Arch — a very thin, very long arch over 300 feet (100 m); the largest in the park
* Fiery Furnace — an area of maze-like narrow passages and tall rock columns (see biblical reference Fiery Furnace)
* Devil's Garden — with many arches and columns scattered along a ridge
* Dark Angel — a free-standing column of dark stone at the end of the Devil's Garden trail.
* Courthouse Towers — a collection of tall stone columns
* Petrified dunes — petrified remnants of sand dunes blown from the ancient lakes that covered the area.

Geology:

The national park lies atop an underground salt bed, which is the main cause of the formation of the arches and spires, balanced rocks, sandstone fins, and eroded monoliths in the area. Thousands of feet thick in places, this salt bed was deposited over the Colorado Plateau some 300 million years ago when a sea flowed into the region and eventually evaporated. Over millions of years, the salt bed was covered with residue from floods and winds and the oceans that came in intervals. Much of this debris was compressed into rock. At one time this overlying earth may have been one mile thick.

Salt under pressure is unstable, and the salt bed below Arches was no match for the weight of this thick cover of rock. Under such pressure it shifted, buckled, liquefied, and repositioned itself, thrusting the Earth layers upward into domes. Whole sections dropped into cavities. In places they turned almost on edge. Faults occurred. The result of one such 2,500-foot displacement, the Moab Fault, is seen from the visitor center.

As this subsurface movement of salt shaped the Earth, surface erosion stripped away the younger rock layers. Except for isolated remnants, the major formations visible in the park today are the salmon-colored Entrada Sandstone, in which most of the arches form, and the buff-colored Navajo Sandstone. These are visible in layer cake fashion throughout most of the park. Over time water seeped into the superficial cracks, joints, and folds of these layers. Ice formed in the fissures, expanding and putting pressure on surrounding rock, breaking off bits and pieces. Winds later cleaned out the loose particles. A series of free-standing fins remained. Wind and water attacked these fins until, in some, the cementing material gave way and chunks of rock tumbled out. Many damaged fins collapsed. Others, with the right degree of hardness and balance, survived despite their missing sections. These became the famous arches.

History:

Humans have occupied the region since the last ice age 10,000 years ago. Fremont people and Ancient Pueblo People lived in the area up until about 700 years ago. Spanish missionaries encountered Ute and Paiute tribes in the area when they first came through in 1775, but the first European-Americans to attempt settlement in the area were the Mormon Elk Mountain Mission in 1855, who soon abandoned the area. Ranchers, farmers, and prospectors later settled Moab in the neighboring riverine valley in the 1880s. Word of the beauty in the surrounding rock formations spread beyond the settlement as a possible tourist destination.

The Arches area was first brought to the attention of the National Park Service by Frank A. Wadleigh, passenger traffic manager of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad. Wadleigh, accompanied by railroad photographer George L. Beam, visited the area in September 1923 at the invitation of Alexander Ringhoffer, a Hungarian-born prospector living in Salt Valley. Ringhoffer had written to the railroad in an effort to interest them in the tourist potential of a scenic area he had discovered the previous year with his two sons and a son-in-law, which he called the "Devil's Garden" (known today as the "Klondike Bluffs"). Wadleigh was impressed by what Ringhoffer showed him, and suggested to Park Service director Stephen T. Mather that the area be made a national monument.

The following year additional support for the monument idea came from Laurence M. Gould, a University of Michigan graduate student studying the geology of the nearby La Sal mountains, who was shown the scenic area by retired local physician Dr. J.W. "Doc" Williams.

A succession of government investigators examined the area, in part due to confusion as to the precise location. In the process the name "Devil's Garden" was transposed to an area on the opposite side of Salt Valley, and Ringhoffer's original discovery was omitted, while another area nearby, known locally as "The Windows", was included. Designation of the area as a national monument was supported by the Park Service from 1926, but was resisted by President Calvin Coolidge's Interior Secretary. Finally in April 1929, shortly after his inauguration, President Herbert Hoover signed a presidential proclamation creating Arches National Monument, consisting of two comparatively small, disconnected sections. The purpose of the reservation under the 1906 Antiquities Act was to protect the arches, spires, balanced rocks, and other sandstone formations for their scientific and educational value. The name "Arches" was suggested by Frank Pinkely, superintendent of the Park Service's southwestern national monuments, following a visit to the Windows section in 1925.

In late 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a proclamation which enlarged the Arches to protect additional scenic features and permit development of facilities to promote tourism. A small adjustment was made by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 to accommodate a new road alignment.

In early 1969, just before leaving office, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a proclamation substantially enlarging the Arches. Two years later President Richard Nixon signed legislation enacted by Congress which significantly reduced the area of Arches, but changed its status to a National Park.

Recreational activities:

Climbing of named arches within the park has long been banned by park regulations. However, following a successful free climb of Delicate Arch by Dean Potter on May 6, 2006, the wording of the regulations was deemed unenforceable by the park attorney. In response, on May 9, 2006, the park revised its regulations as follows:

"All rock climbing or similar activities on any arch or natural bridge named on the United States Geological Survey 7.5 minute topographical maps covering Arches National Park are prohibited."

Climbing of other features in the park is allowed, but regulated. The revised regulations also prohibit slacklining parkwide. Approved recreational activities include auto touring, backpacking, biking, camping, and hiking, some of which require permits. There are also guided commercial tours and ranger programs.

Publicity:

American writer Edward Abbey was a park ranger at Arches National Monument where he kept journals that became his book Desert Solitaire. The success of this book, as well as the rise in adventure-based recreation, has drawn many hikers, mountain-bikers, and off-road enthusiasts to the area, but activities are limited within park boundaries: camping, foot hiking (along designated trails), and driving only along marked roads.

The opening scenes of the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade were filmed at the park.

Biology:

There is an abundance of wildlife in Arches NP. The list includes: Spadefoot Toad, Scrub Jay, peregrine falcon, many kinds of Sparrows, Red Fox, Desert Bighorn Sheep, Kangaroo rat, Mule Deer, mountain lion, Midget-Faded Rattlesnake, Yucca Moth, many types of Cyanobacteria, western rattlesnake, and the Western Collard Lizard.

Plants also dominate the landscape in the park. The list of plants consistes of: Prickly pear cactus, Indian RiceGrass, Bunch Grasses, Cheatgrass, Lichen, Mosses, Liverworts, Utah Juniper, Morman Tea, Blackbrush, Cliffrose, Four-winged Saltbrush, Pinyon pine, Stemless woollybase, evening primrose, sand verbena, yucca, and the Sacred Datura.
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