Arches National Park – North East of Moab, UT

From Arches National Park handout “THE STORY GEOLOGISTS TELL . . . The park lies atop an underground salt bed that is responsible for the arches, spires, balanced rocks, sandstone fins, and eroded monoliths of this mecca for sightseers. Thousands of feet thick in places, this salt bed was deposited across the Colorado Plateau 300 million years ago when a sea flowed in the region and eventually evaporated. Over millions of years, residue form floods, winds, and the oceans that came and went blanketed the salt bed. The debris was compressed as rock at one time possibly a mile thick. . .”

We are only a month into the season so traffic was easy up and down the road into/up to Arches National Park with only a few (less than a dozen) bicycles making the climb. They have labeled a number of rock formations like the “Balanced Rock” (don’t know if it’s fair but it is indeed balanced). We were able to identify a number of our own – Sphinx look alike, turtle head coming out of it’s shell, some male body parts that have had heavy doses of Viagra, a Walrus head, a group of monkeys doing the “hear no eveil see no evil, speak no evil” routine, one particular close copy of the Easter Island God statutes, and a hang down dog face to name a few.

There was a Garden of Eden Viewpoint that we stopped for. If this reflects Eden, I can see why they ate the apple. And, further on down the road there was the Devils Garden Trailhead. The views were as magnificent going up as going down. There were sections that looked like city streets amoung all the sky scrapers. We talked with a lot of foreign tourists mostly from Germany and Japan