Day 13, Part 3: Thursday, May 4th, 2006
Arches National Park

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Aside from missing out on a close encounter with Delicate Arch, I did almost everything a casual tourist could do in Arches National Park the last time I came through this way. So, this time, I decide to take it one step further in the afternoon by driving the gravel road out to the "Klondike Bluffs" section in the northwest corner of the park.

I leave the Arches that most visitors know behind once I'm off the pavement. I drive for about ten miles through an open, green plain known as the Salt Valley until I get to the trailhead for the Klondike Bluffs. There I discover only one other car--an SUV--in the parking lot. It has, to my surprise, Indiana plates. Since I have been playing the license plate game against myself for the entire trip, I know for a fact that I haven't seen another Indiana plate for days. Yet somehow, we Hoosiers are the only ones in the park today with the temerity to come out to this not-really-all-that-remote place.

A Park Service placard at the trailhead informs me of what to expect on the one and only trail through the Klondike Bluffs. There's some sort of feature known as the "Marching Men" out there, and a "spectacular" arch known as Tower Arch at the end of the trail. There is also an inscription at the base of Tower Arch from one Alexander Ringhoffer, a prospector who first discovered it some eighty-four years ago. The placard warns all hikers not to touch the historic inscription.

With this in mind, I set off down the trail, gazing up at the crystal blue sky above the bluffs.


After a longer-than-expected, dusty hike through a serene, desert world, I pass by a series of stone pillars that I figure have to be the "Marching Men." There are at least four of them--depending on how you count--and they get smaller as you go from front to back. The two that are in the lead even appear to have eyes and noses.

After passing by the Marching Men, the trail leads me up a pair of steep, orange dunes--which are anything but fun to hike up--and into a secluded grove of enormous sandstone fins. The center of one of them has been eaten away by thousands of years of erosion to form Tower Arch.

There is a group of people--the first human beings I've seen since I left the pavement--perched inside the arch. They don't say a word to me as I walk up towards them, but I eventually break the ice by asking them if they're from Indiana. When they say they are, I tell them I'm from Bloomington. They seem unimpressed by this. Eventually, they inform me that they're from Hanover College, which is apparently in the southeast corner of the state. I mis-hear what they say as "Hangover College", and repeat that back to them. They concede that it is not a completely unfair characterization of the place.

With that lame joke, our lame conversation ends. I crawl up behind the arch to get a view of the window from the backside, but I find that I can't get high enough to fit the whole thing into my camera's viewfinder. I also discover that the Hanover crowd is clustered around the Ringhoffer inscription at one end of the arch, and I'm too self-conscious to ask them if I can walk into their midst to take a picture of it.

Instead, I start walking back to the parking lot at the trailhead. Before I get very far, though, I discover another large arch just a couple hundred feet from Tower Arch. It's not marked on my map, but since it only consists of a small gap between a rock wall and a parabola of stone, it may not be considered worthy of having its own name. Either way, I'm impressed by it, and I decide to camp down underneath it for awhile to eat my lunch.

While I'm doing so, I take the most scenic picture of my feet possible.

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