The dynamic landscape of Arches National Park is like a storybook, telling tales of change across this unique land. The forces of erosion, water, gravity, and time have brought the stories of arches to live. Existing arches fall and new arches form, at about the same pace! In 1991, a piece of Landscape Arch tumbled to the ground and the Wall Arch collapsed in 2008, leaving only a pile of sandstone. There are currently over 2,000 arches in the park. At some point in time, all these will disappear…but new arches are continuing to form.

To monitor tension in various rock formations, researchers from the University of Utah, installed crackmeters (in 2015) which measure rock movement, hopefully, to warn of possible failures. The crackmeters have since found patterns in the crack activity as temperature and seasons change. The data show that the cracks expand and contract up to 0.82 inches annually, yet it stays within the same range of movement from year to year. Someday these cracks will expand beyond their normal range, bringing their demise.

We are publishing two successive postings dealing with Arches. We like to limit the number of photographs in each posting, primarily to alleviate boredom for our readers. As we began sorting and reducing our photographs for Arches we discovered there would be too many for one posting (in part because Meriam insisted on including a number of amazing spring wildflowers J. With every flower, she wondered how they could survive and flourish in this land of extremes…and with only 8 inches of water annually).

It was an amazing three days for us.

Valley between the two “sections” of Arches. Colors are almost as good as Painted Desert.

First of six amazing flowers we photographed blooming in this desert setting. This beauty is actually in the rhubarb family.

Delicate Arch, perhaps the most famous arch in Arches. In the next photograph, note the right-hand column of the arch. This narrowing column is very delicate!

We were very fortunate to have a background of snow-covered mountains and wonderful clouds in many of our photographs.

The structure on the right is known as “balance rock”. This photograph illustrates the massiveness of this precariously placed rock.

Claret Cup Cactus

Meriam provides a perspective of the size of Skyline Arch.

While arches of stone are iconic of Arches, there are many other amazing rock structures in the park.

“Fins” like these are often the early stages of arches development. Water and wind begin eroding at the bottom, ultimately creating an arch.

Here Meriam stands between a pair of fins, illustrating how massive these structures are.