42.) Cairn Hunting......View Viewing......and Dark Double Arches...

 

     I awake from my daydream and continue on, down the Broken Arch trail which leads right through the arch itself and into the campground. It’s a gorgeous place, surrounded with more rock fins, some 2 and 3 stories tall. Spires of the same red rock reach even higher in some places. The trail goes up, over, and sometimes right along these formations. When you hike on solid rock, a well worn trail is not possible the way it is through the woods or even on the desert floor. So I have to be on the lookout for rock cairns, manmade stacks of 3 or 4 small rocks that mark the trail. It makes hiking here into a game of sorts. I see a cairn, I hike to it, and from there I spin around until I locate the next one and off I go. It’s fairly obvious, not at all difficult to follow, but it’s different than just trudging down a well defined path.  

     I spend the rest of the day bouncing around on these rock trails, seeking out cairns and taking in all the views the desert has to offer. I consider the campground, it’d be quite an experience to stay out here after dark, but it’s 20 bucks a night to camp and I’m on the tightest of budgets. Food, gas, the occasional libation. My money is holding out better than I thought it would, but I have no idea when or how I’ll have the chance to make more, plus further investigation reveals that the entire campground is booked solid for the next few weeks so I stick to my free car camping in town.

     Before I exit the park for the night I watch the sun set on the Park Avenue Trail from the back of the jeep. The night before, my hiking boots had made sleeping in the jeep rather ripe, if you know what I mean, so before I set out this morning I powdered them liberally with odor eaters. I remove my boots as the sun continues it’s slow decent to the horizon and discover that I may have been a bit too caviler with the powder. Inside my sweaty boots all day it’s turned into a kind of paste between my toes. A rather unpleasant feeling but the silver lining is the gross feeling paste smells great! Let’s hear it for the smallest of victories! Park Avenue fades along with the sun, from red, to deep purple, to pure black. The same thing its done every single night for billions of years, nothing more than just ‘IS’.

 

 

     Moab mornings have been consistently overcast and rainy during my stay here, but by lunchtime blue skies usually make an appearance complete with cotton candy clouds. Today is no exception and I take advantage by heading to a new section of the park. Trails to The Windows and Double Arch take me on a 3 mile jaunt that is anything but disappointing. It’s still too crowed in my opinion, but the Double Arch might be the most impressive formation yet. And with the La Sal Mountains as a constant back drop it’s difficult to get too worked up about all the tourists. 

It’s hard to believe but my guidebook says Double Arch started as a small depression in the top of this huge boulder.  The depression would fill with water, and that water would work it’s way into small crack, and slowly make the bigger. Fast forward a few million years and you get Double Arch, two mammoth archways separated by a kind of skylight.  The water started where the ‘skylight’ is now, worked its way down and flowed either out the frontside of the formation or the backside, forming both arches that I’m able to climb up into. The floor below them is littered with huge boulder that obviously fell from above in times past, and we’re all having a jolly good time playing underneath.  Someday, someone, maybe several someones, in possession of the worlds worst timing will be hurt or killed here. Crushed by a hunk of boulder that hasn't moved in ages. It’s the truth, but…Why so dark Skala?