A Few More Bits and Pieces

Just after sunrise on a slightly overcast day, this is what Arches looks like.

It's unreal, isn't it? We were standing on an overlook that faced down the valley toward "Park Avenue." There is a one-mile trail that cuts through there and comes out the other side. We didn't hike that trail because it was our first morning in the park and this was the first thing we stopped to look at. Our eyes were starved for more, and we wanted to see as much as we could as soon as we could that first morning. We weren't ready to slow down enough to hike, so we got in the car and continued on along the road.

The rocks are red because they're chock full of iron. Exposed to water and to the oxygen in air, iron oxidizes to this red color. It's rust, basically, with a few other minerals and such thrown in to make it interesting. With enough oxygen and water and time, any amount of iron will be converted to rust. Then it disintegrates, like wood turning to ashes in a fire. Then it disappears. So when you think about it, it's lucky that we even got to see this. I mean, next year it could all be gone, right?

This is what my hand looks like when I've been in red clay all day.

So it's no surprise that I love the red earth.


The next day, we walked an easy half mile or so to this little feature. You can see Dave standing there in the lower left-hand corner. Dave is about seventy-eight inches tall, so I would guess that that arch is well over 100 inches tall. Maybe even as much as 200 inches. (I'm joking, of course. The arch is close to 100 feet tall.)

If I wasn't careful, I kept falling into the sky. There is big, big sky out there.

Big sky.

Everywhere you look: Big sky.

The light is unreal.

That dizzy feeling is not just altitude sickness.

If you're not done looking at rocks when the crowds drive you away from the arches, you can go to this crazy rock shop that I mentioned before: Lin Ottinger's Moab Rock Shop.

This is one tiny corner of the shop. They sell rocks and such that the 85-year-old rockhound owner brings back from his travels (and they also sell fossils and rocks collected all around the world by other people). Apparently the guy is quite a colorful character. He looks like an old prospector from the movies, skinny, wiry, a bit dried up and crusty, sporting a big beard and an ugly hat. All he needs is a weary old mule to complete the picture. The guy even has a dinosaur named after him, since he was the first to find its fossilized bits out in the Utah desert.

The owner's daughter was manning the counter on our first visit. I bought a bit of dinosaur bone and she told us that her father had found it back when it was still legal to collect them. (It's since become illegal, though people still do it, I'm sure.) I wonder how she knew that specific bit of bone from the hundreds (thousands?) of other bits of bone in the shop, but you never know. Maybe it's just me that assumes that, after awhile, all the little bits of dinosaur bone start running together. (Or maybe they're selling bits of old-ish non-dinosaur bones to know-nothings like me.)

And speaking of digging up old things:

This is a photo of me, taken forty years ago, soon after my fourth birthday. Cute, no?