Arches National Park

Big event for the 15th was Arches National Park. We packed up the tent, hopped in the car and trundled over there. Drove past the US Dept of Energy UMTRA project site (a 19 year uranium mining clean up project) and into Arches. Even from the visitors centre the view is impressive:

We then drove up a fairly steep access road to the park itself. Part way up there is an info board illustrating the tectonic plate movements that created the valley.

 
Note how the section in front of the road slopes under the section aft of the road. Pretty impressive.

From the same vantage point I could make out an UMTRA train, which ships the uranium mine tailings from the old mine site between two national parks, and the disposal cell at Green River. The containers are all special US DOE nuclear approved ones. The scale of the project is amazing; two loaded trains of containers every weekday until 2019. They're also busy filtering the aquifers, pumping out contaminated water and replacing it with clean filtered water.

Anyway we stopped at the first walk point and went for a walk down Park Avenue.

Spot the human

Truly impressive scale of scenery here. I was amused to see they have a "balance rock" too. Actually they have quite a few of them. On our way back we bumped into a park ranger and had a good chat with her. She was excited to hear about the lizards we'd seen scampering around. She shows us flash cards of other animals we might see; lizards, tree lizards, collared lizards, rattle snakes, gopher snakes ("they're constrictors, so they won't bite you, just give you a big squeeze" "oh and they're only six feet long"), garter snakes, cougars, big horn sheep, coyotes, squirrels and chipmunks. Great list…! We asked about the chipmunks and probably made her day in the process; she suddenly dived into her bag and rummaged around and out came her illustrated guide to America critters pocket book. So we learnt that chipmunks are like little squirrels, but with speed stripes down their back.

Onwards we went, across more impossible landscapes.

Saw these guys speeding past; not sure if it's a car or motorbike.

Credits to the fisheye-waist-sniper-cam :-)

Then we arrived at Balanced Rock. This one sort of puts Helper's rock to shame!

Photographers galore!

This rock was truly massive, towering over everything. By now we could see the usual afternoon thunderstorms building away in the distance. Seems to be a bit of a pattern around here; hot sunny mornings, cool thundery afternoons. We're slowly adjusting to suit the weather schedules.

From one vantage point we could see mesas away in the distance, stretching out of their canyon floors into the rain. (Mesa being a massive flat-topped rock plateau).

 
Mesas just visible in the darkest part of the second photo.

Went for a longish walk to see the twin-windows. By now the weather was starting to deteriorate; by the time we got back to the car Angela's hair was standing on end, not a good sign when their are thunderstorms all around! Means that the electric fields are building up, and electric fields are what make lightening. So we jumped in the car where according to the park info sheet we'd be quite safe.

The arches (yes finally we saw some!) themselves were massive.

Southeast Utah isn't that far from New Mexico, the Extra Terrestrial Highway and Area 51; photo of some local UFO activity.

Next we walked to Double Arch. The echo here is awesome!

For our final trip we went to see Delicate Arch. I've actually already seen Delicate Arch several thousand times; it's on the number plate of every Utah registered vehicle. It's better seeing it in person though!

The scenery here is so unreal! The echo was amazing; someone wolf whistled and it was as if someone on the opposite side was answering; that's how long and clear the echo was.

By now the thunderstorm had moved on elsewhere (they seem to roam) and there was fresh snow on some of the surrounding peaks. Not bad for first week of Autumn here!

 

 

 

Went for one final walk to some towering fins.

By now we were pretty exhausted so we drove back out to Moab. Moab is a funny town. Everyone raves about how awesome it is, and granted for a couple of blocks in centre-city it is nice, but the rest of the town is just blocks of motels and roads big (and busy!) enough to be interstates. We had dinner at Zax again, this time I opted for pizza (sorry mum) and it was pretty good, though my last slice was really spicy and had a weird taste; they didn't put labels on any of the buffet pizza so it really was lucky dip.

Stayed the night at a campground; unfortunately their wireless didn't quite reach our campground. Also for $25 (ex-tax… nothing over here includes tax) I expected a patch of grass to pitch on, but all I got was gravel. Someone in one of the other sites had, literally, an oxy-acetylene welding rig. The guy looked like one of those half-crazed construction challenge TV show hosts. In the morning we were woken bright and early by:

1. The school over the fence;
2. The building site over the fence;
3. The forklift (beep beep beep every 30s) at the warehouse over another fence,
4. The highway over another fence.

So by 7:30am we were wide awake. That's 1:30am NZ time! Next stop… Colorado (with one tiny detour).