Day 13, Part 1: Thursday, May 4th, 2006
Arches National Park

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In the Spring of 1996, Jeff Bogda came to visit me at Pomona College, and I bought a road atlas for the first time. Back then, I just needed it to know how to drive Jeff and myself from Claremont to LAX to Santa Barbara and back--but the picture on the front of the road atlas fascinated me. It showed a natural arch, surrounded by a world of red rock. No grass, no trees, no nothing--just red rock, as far as the eye could see. Did such a world really exist, and in the United States of America, to boot? If so, I had to see it. The inside cover of the road atlas claimed that the arch on the front was called "Delicate Arch," and that it could be found in a place called Arches National Park, in Utah. And so, in the summer of 1997, I took off down the road towards Utah, looking for fantastical visions of reality.

I made it to Arches on that trip but never really saw Delicate Arch. I copped out by just going to the Delicate Arch viewpoint, from which you can see the famous rock formation from about a half a mile away, on the other side of a canyon. At the time, I thought that that was good enough. But, over the years, I saw so many pictures of Delicate Arch close up, that I decided I would one day have to go back for a better view. It wasn't, in fact, even clear to me how big Delicate Arch was. Every picture you see of it looks almost exactly the same--you can't tell if it's ten feet high or a hundred feet high. It's always just there, forever frozen, context-free, in its own, weird world.


On my way into the national park, I stop at the turnout for the LaSal Mountains and look back at the red rock cliffs that guard the entryway to the arches. With some self-satisfaction, I confirm to myself that they're made out of Wingate sandstone.

I cruise through the rest of the park, stopping only once to pay a visit to my old friend, the Balanced Rock, before queueing up behind a clutter of tourists at the Delicate Arch trailhead. It's a fairly long hike to get out there. Eventually, though, I find myself disappearing into a world that's made up of only red sandstone. (This is the Entrada variety, for those of you who are keeping score at home.)

It's only in this kind of a place that something like Delicate Arch can make sense. I'm excited to be able to see it now, with the snowy LaSal Mountains for a backdrop.

An older man wobbles out underneath the arch to give me a sense of its scale. It's a lot bigger than I imagined. It is, in fact, huge.

This is approximately the angle at which the picture on the cover of the road atlas was taken. Now that I can see it for myself, I know that this place consist of more than just red rocks. But it'll do. :-)

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