The highway that runs past the Visitors Center actually follows the same route as the old Spanish Trail connecting Sante Fe to Los Angeles. The pictures depict riders on horseback, indicating that the carvings were made sometime after the middle of the sixteenth century when Spanish explorers first introduced horses to the Southwest. Well-preserved petroglyphs carved into a cliff in the park testify that people have inhabited the region for a long time. History of Arches National Park: Inhabitants and ExplorersĪrches National Park is more than a concentration of spectacular rock arches. Landscape Arch, with a span of 306 feet, is the longest in the world and only one of eight arches along the just over seven-mile-long Devils Garden Trail. The park's most photographed attraction, Delicate Arch, is isolated in its own amphitheater, framing a stunning view of endless sandstone. Such an opening gradually enlarged until the window became an arch. The next phase in the process occurred as wind and frost brushed away at the soft interior area of some of these fins, eventually perforating them with a window. Then, narrow canyons and gullies were scoured out of the stone, leaving thin walls called "fins" in between. At first, water and wind cracked the exposed sandstone. Then the land was lifted up, tilted, and eroded until the Entrada layer was exposed to the weather. The lovely rock scenery has been featured in such classic films as Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Double Arch) and the comedy City Slickers (North Window). The Windows section of the park provides yet another set of fantastic vistas. Visitors often spot such high-desert fauna as mule deer and coyotes at sunrise and sunset. Another noted feature that is easily accessible via the park road is "Park Avenue," where vertical slabs or fins of red Entrada sandstone tower over the surrounding painted desert like New York skyscrapers.Ĭlose by Park Avenue is Courthouse Towers, where some of the best hiking in the park is found. There are hundreds of them, and they come in every shape and color imaginable, from the world-famous Delicate Arch to the colossal Landscape Arch. The arch is all that remains of a huge sandstone wall called a fin.Īrches National Park contains the world's largest concentration of natural stone arches. ©2006 National Park Services Delicate Arch, which is 65 feet tall and 35 feet wide, perches on the rim of a canyon. To read about the most impressive sights (and to learn which movies Arches has been in), go to the next page. You'll witness firsthand the unusual landscapes that have been backdrops for some well-known movies. If you're planning to visit Utah, a trip to Arches is well worth the time it takes to get there. It is a place teeming with scenic treasures almost beyond belief: mountains, gorges, rushing rivers, great canyons, escarpments, buttes, spires, pinnacles, and endless stretches of desert landscape. This area is one of the most sparsely populated region of the contiguous 48 states, but it contains the nation's greatest wealth of national parks. These formations sparkle and shimmer beneath an enormous blue sky.Īrches is perched atop the Colorado Plateau, a high desert region stretching from western Colorado across southern Utah and northern New Mexico to Arizona. Glistening slickrock domes are inlaid with swirls of stone cut by red sandy washes and dotted with wildflowers in spring. There are pedestals and spires that resemble a child's drip castles enlarged to enormous scale. A fantasyland of rock, Arches National Park is filled with giant balanced rocks that look as though they are about to teeter and fall.
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