Day two began exactly like day one.
Nicholas had calls. Long ones. I had assumed the whole point of a spontaneous road trip was that nobody could reach you, and I was wrong about that in a way I intend to keep bringing up.
He brought a Starlink. He packed a satellite dish, for a holiday, and then aimed it at the sky from increasingly absurd places so that a meeting could continue. Red rock, no phone signal for miles, a landscape that has been quietly eroding since the Jurassic, and a man in the middle of it saying “sorry, can you repeat that, I lost you for a second.” He did not lose them. That was the tragedy. The dish worked perfectly every single time.
So we got into Arches in the afternoon, again, and the first thing my bud did on arrival was buy a mug.
Not a postcard. Not a map. A mug, from the visitor centre, with the park’s name on it. He has apparently decided that he is now a man who collects a mug at every national park, and that this decision is retroactive and binding for the rest of the trip. I want it noted that nobody voted on this.
I gave it about a day before I started checking whether the next park had good ones.
The Windows#
Arches has a standard loop and we did the standard loop, because the standard loop is standard for a reason. First stop was the Windows Section, which is a cluster of arches all within a few minutes’ walk of each other, so you get an extremely good ratio of arches to effort.
The two big openings sit side by side in one long fin, and from the right angle they line up as a pair. The park calls them the Spectacles. I have no notes. That is exactly what they look like.
You can climb up inside the openings, which people do, and then stand there being a silhouette in everyone else’s photograph. Nicholas did not go up. Nicholas stood at the bottom getting quietly furious at the people who did, waiting for a gap in the queue of strangers posing in his shot. There was no gap. There is never a gap.
Sand Dune Arch#
Then a short stop at Sand Dune Arch, which is down a gap between two fins and feels completely unlike the rest of the park. You walk in through a slot, the walls close over, the temperature drops, and the floor turns to deep soft sand that swallows your feet.
Every child in southern Utah is in there at any given moment, throwing sand. I respect the operation.
The Delicate Arch Decision#
Here is where we had to choose.
It was getting on, and the light was going, and we could do Delicate Arch or we could get to Landscape Arch. Not both. Delicate Arch is the famous one, the one on the licence plates, and I am told the walk out to it is a proper uphill slog with a crowd at the end.
We went to Landscape Arch instead. I have been informed this was a scheduling decision. I am recording it as a choice, because Landscape Arch is by far the more interesting object and I will explain why.
Look at how thin it is. At its narrowest that ribbon of sandstone is about six feet (1.8 m) thick, holding a span longer than a football pitch.
And this is the bit worth knowing. Sandstone is excellent at being squashed and terrible at being stretched. A short, fat, steep arch like Delicate Arch is basically a thick lintel sitting on two thick legs, and almost all of the weight goes straight down through the rock as compression, which sandstone is happy to do all day. A long flat span is a different problem entirely. The underside of it is in tension, being pulled apart, and that is the one thing this rock cannot do. So the span gets thinner, and the thinner it gets, the less there is to share the load.
Landscape Arch is not being coy about this. It dropped a 60 foot (18 m) slab off its underside in 1991, with people standing underneath it, and shed more rock in 1995. The trail that used to run under the arch has been closed ever since. You look at it from a rope line now, at a polite distance, the way you would look at something that has already told you what it intends to do.
Delicate Arch will still be standing in a very long time. Landscape Arch is a countdown. That is why it is the better one to go and see.
Broken Arch#
Then Nicholas announced the plan for the night.
The plan was Broken Arch. He had been eyeing it all afternoon for one reason: it is an arch you can stand well back from, on open slickrock, with a clean view through the opening and nothing in the way. Which is another way of saying it would frame the galaxy nicely, and everything else that day had been reconnaissance.
That notch across the top is the whole reason for the name. The span has a proper fracture through it and it has simply declined to finish the job so far.
The Mosquitoes#
We settled in to wait for dark. Packs down, dinner out of the containers, headlamps ready, several hours to burn before the sky did anything interesting.
And then the mosquitoes arrived.
In the desert. In a national park made almost entirely of rock and sand and the absence of water, at an arch on an exposed slab, there were mosquitoes, and there were a lot of them, and they found Pokin immediately.
She got bitten a great deal. Nicholas got bitten a great deal. I have never once been bothered by a mosquito in fourteen years of travel and I sat there watching the two of them slap at their own arms in the dark like it was a hobby.
Pokin’s position, delivered several times, was that this had better be worth it.
It Was Worth It#
The Milky Way core came up over the arch and stood there.
There is a faint streak on the left of that frame. Before anybody asks, yes, I checked, and yes, it is almost certainly another satellite. I have made my peace.
Then he set up the one I actually care about.
That is the three of us sitting under a rock that has been slowly falling apart since before anybody was around to name it, under the arm of a galaxy, in the middle of a road trip where nobody had decided where we were sleeping.
Not bad for a Friday.
Pokin’s Contribution#
Pokin also attempted an astro shot. On her phone. Handheld.
I want to be fair to it. It is a photograph of a man standing in an arch under the stars, and all of those elements are technically present. The stars are there. The arch is there. The man is there with his hands on his hips, doing the pose, fully committed.
It also looks like something recovered from a haunted camcorder. Pokin submitted it entirely without shame, which I respect more than the photo.
Walking Out#
We hiked back to the car in the dark with headlamps, over slickrock, following little reflective markers and Nicholas’s memory of where the trail had been in daylight. Pokin was still itching. Chestnut had opinions about the dark and they were, as always, positive ones.
Two parks in two days, one mug acquired, an unknown number of bites, and one photograph that will end up on a wall.
Day three, nobody knows yet.