Arches National Park Utah

Formation in Arches National Park Utah

If your western trip happens to take you near the southeast part of Utah, you have a real treat in store. Arches National Park is geologically one of the most unique of all our national parks. The south end of Arches NP starts just a few miles north of the town of Moab Utah. This beautiful national park makes for a great family vacation stop providing not only one of a kind scenery but also many foot trails. Moab Utah is also home to Canyonlands National Park, about 35 miles west of the town. Many tourists to Utah make Moab a kind of base for their hiking, biking and river activities in that part of the state. For those wanting to find out how Moab received it's name from it's Mormon founding, the bible refers to an area east of the Jordan River as Moab.

One unique trait of Arches National Park Utah is that it lies on top of a large underground salt bed. In fact, according to the National Park Service, this salt bed deposited 300 million years ago on the Colorado Plateau, is what is responsible for the types of geology found there. The arches, the balancing rocks, spires and sandstone fins. Over millions of years, floods, oceans and winds covered and battered this area. The resulting debris from this action turned into rock that at some points was a mile thick. The enormous rock pressure caused the underlying salt bed to buckle and liquify and this shot the rock upward as domes. The enormity of this geologic shifting created the beautiful scenery you see today at Arches National Park. The park offers the beauty of contrasting colors and textures found nowhere else on earth. These Utah arches display amazing geologic sandstone formations.

Balancing Rock formation

An interesting thing is that the park continues to change even today. New arches are being created and some old ones are being destroyed. According to the NPS, in 1991 a sixty foot long, eleven foot wide and four foot thick, rock slab fell from beneath Landscape Arch. More recently, in 2008, Wall Arch, located along the Devils Garden Trail collapsed. The NPS added that all arches are really temporary and that at some point erosion coupled with the force of gravity will crumble the arches. The very fact of the delicate nature of the arches and spires make this one of the most active national parks in the nation.

Most travelers to this region of the United States know that Indians inhabited the area for centuries. This part of the country is home to many ancient pueblo dwellings as well as petroglyphs and pictographs. These remnants of the Indians presence tell historians quite a lot about their pueblo civilization. These native Americans both hunted grew crops such as beans and squash. Arches National Park is located just north of the pueblo dwelling civilization and as a result there are no cave dwellings found there. Not too far south of Arches however at Mesa Verde National Park are some of the most stunning cliff dwellings found anywhere.

European settlement in southeastern Utah was not from the Spaniards to the south but from the Mormons. The Spaniards explored the area mostly to find routes from the Santa Fe area to their missions in California but did not build settlements as they did in Nuevo Mexico. The Mormons made an early attempt in the 1850's to establish a mission in today's Moab but ran into trouble with the Ute Indians. Eventually, Moab was founded by ranchers, farmers and miners in the last few decades of the 1800's.

Two related articles you will enjoy are Zion National Park in Utah and Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.

Arches National Park geology

This particular part of Utah, near the Four Corners area, is near to many national parks. I've found that a route can be driven from the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona, up to the Glen Canyon Dam outside Page Arizona and then west to Utah enabling you to take in Zion National Park, Bryce National Park and then eastward to Moab Utah and the national parks found there. Your western trip can then allow you an easy drive down to Mesa Verde National Park and nearby historic Durango Colorado. Leaving the east entrance to the Grand Canyon you want to go to Hwy 89 and drive north to Page Arizona. From Page, US Hwy 89A crosses the Colorado River and the Glen Canyon Dam. Hwy 89A will take you west to Zion National Park and will also take you north to Bryce Canyon. Drive north from Bryce Canyon on Hwy 89 to Interstate 70. Drive west on scenic Interstate 70 all the way to the US Hwy 191 exit and Moab is about 30 miles south. This is a multi day trip but allows you to visit many of our finest national parks all along the way.

Mesa Verde National Park is about 138 miles south of Moab via US Hwy 191 and US Hwy 491 outside of Cortez Colorado. Durango Colorado is about 48 miles east of Cortez on US Hwy 160.

(Photos are from author's private collection)