I’ve mentioned this before, but I have this mental condition where I avoid anything that sounds too popular in my mind. Delicate Arch, in Arches National Park has always been one of those overly popular places. I’ve seen so many pictures of it over the years that I simply never had any interest in seeing it in person. I had some experienced friends tell me recently that it was indeed worth seeing, and that the hike was pretty cool, so since I had a week in Moab, and since it was still very snowy in many nearby places I figured I’d give it a shot. Below is my “review.”
Delicate Arch
The first half of the hike is rather boring, but after a long ascent up a large body of slickrock things start to get more interesting. After not too long you round a cliff and walk unexpectedly out onto the large rock bench with the arch on it. The arch is much larger than I had imagined. It looks to be four or five stories tall, and it’s unarguably a beautiful carving. I was sure by the time I left that I had almost found the control panel that turned it into an inter-dimensional portal.
Delicate Arch
So the thing to do is sit around and wait for the sun to set, and that’s exactly what every one does. As expected, there were a ton of people milling about. Some arrived early and had staked out their respective positions. They had their tripods set up and were snapping a picture every three minutes, capturing the slowly changing light. The majority of people though, were constantly getting in the way of that first set of people by taking turns posing underneath the arch in whatever silly charade they could think of. I mean seriously, some people were actually pretending to be in bed underneath the arch. How do they think of those things? At least they were having fun.
Delicate Arch.
I didn’t see any way to get a shot of the arch without people standing under it or in the way of it, unless I took enough pictures that I caught every part of the background in at least one picture, due to people constantly moving around, stacked the resulting images into layers, and then photoshop the people out. Furthermore, it seemed silly to just stand around and take the same picture I’ve seen a million times over. The arch is pretty, but it’s really just one jewel of an exceptionally interesting landscape of slickrock.
The rock plummets off a massive escarpment into a canyon right behind the arch, and also off the side of the trail that you walk on during your approach. A deep round bowl on the front side of the arch prevents people from getting any different angle than what you normally see in typical photos. I found the bowl itself very interesting. It was probably 50 yards long and 25 wide with no outlet. Eventually my curiosity (and lack of being able to sit still) got the better of me and I wandered away to see if I could get down into that bowl.
Delicate Arch. Here you can see everything in the other pictures. The depth of the bowl, the other arch and little people on the rim that do a good job at demonstrating how large the cliff is in front of the Arch.
I began climbing around all over the place. There were a lot of neat little areas nearby, and I kept running into a few other people who had similar interests. Then the sun set and everyone started heading back to the parking lot en masse. That meant I had to run back. There was no way I could bear being stuck in post concert style traffic in the middle of nowhere.
Delicate Arch.
Speaking of Arches, across the street is a road that winds along the Colorado River. There is a little state park in the area that goes to a place called Corona Arch. It's a kind of a fun hike to a pretty arch that's like a scale model of Rainbow Bridge in Lake Powell.
Corona Arch
