Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Utah!

Grand Junction, CO - 1 October

American states tend to have little slogans on their car license plates. Arkansas, for example, claims to be The Natural State. Texas is, of course, The Lone Star State, Massachusetts thumps the tub a bit by claiming to be The Spirit Of America, while Idaho goes with the surreal Famous Potatoes. Until recently Utah's plates said Ski Utah!, but as the Ski was hard to read, at a distance the plates just seemed to say Utah!. Why, I thought, did Utah need an exclamation mark (or, as Bill Bryson would probably say, an ejaculation) to advertise itself?

This question was answered for me today when I went and visited southern Utah. The red sandstone landscape is surreal and beautiful, and the number of exclamations I made when rounding a corner to find yet another breathtaking screech-to-a-halt-and-grab-the-camera vista more than justified that exclamation mark on the license plates. It is, in short, just gorgeous. Hot, but gorgeous.

I started the day fairly gently with a spin through Colorado's Grand Mesa National Forest, across the eponymous mesa which claims to be the largest flat-topped mountain in the world. It's about 3000 metres above sea level, and to my surprise was still densely wooded at that altitude. There are numerous small lakes, beautiful views a-plenty, and right now the leaves are beginning to turn and produce some lovely autumn colours. It's a beautiful part of the world, and I found myself thinking just how lucky Americans are to have such a wide variety of landscapes available within their own country. The national parks and national forests are well cared for and looked after, and are really something to be proud of. And there was no shortage of visitors either, which is even better.

Heading back to US-50 via Cedaredge (where the apple festival was going on, so town was a little busy) I ambled back up to Grand Junction and west into Utah on I-70. My plan was to head for Arches National Park and take a few photos. Arches is known for - you guessed it - its natural sandstone arches. The whole of south-eastern Utah is like something out of the Roadrunner cartoons, and among the pinnacles of red rock, canyons and rocks balanced precariously on other rocks I was half-expecting to see Wile E. Coyote stalking past with a large crate from the Acme Corporation. Cartoon coyotes aside, the combination of the red sandstone, blue skies and sparkly waters of the Colorado River in the canyons along state highway 128 to Moab is gorgeously beautiful, and the weirdly-shaped rock formations led to my stopping a lot to take photos of the strange lunar (or more probably, Martian) landscape. Even more surreally, I saw a motor caravan with Dutch numberplates. Did someone take a wrong turning at Utrecht or something?

Having got to Arches I decided to head to Delicate Arch, one of the best-known of the park's natural arches and a symbol of the state of Utah - it adorns the current (but regrettably ejaculation-free) state license plates. After a stop off for a brief photo-op at probably the most Roadrunner-ish thing in Utah, Balanced Rock, I dumped the car in the trailhead car park, grabbed my bottle of water and camera (there are dire warnings posted at the trailhead pointing out that it's 1.5 miles, entirely uphill and totally without shade all the way to the Arch) and skipped merrily off up the trail. It's quite a nice walk in itself, and at the end of the trail I came round a corner and found that I'd arrived at Delicate Arch. Unfortunately, so had a lot of other people. The place was surprisingly busy for somewhere that could only be reached with a non-trivial walk. I couldn't help but notice how many of the people there were speaking German and assorted Scandinavian languages - while there were plenty of Americans there as well, I suspect that while Joe Sixpack will drive to the lookout point some distance from the arch rather than hiking up to the arch itself, Europeans are a bit more likely to make the walk.

I snapped a couple of photos of the arch and settled down in the shade to wait for sunset. Delicate Arch is well-known for being extremely photogenic in the last minutes before the sun sets - the side of the arch is aligned on a sort of west-south-westerly axis, so the setting sun brings out the detail of the rock and makes the sandstone much redder. A lot of people had lugged tripods and camera bags and (in the case of one group) several takeaway pizzas up to wait for sunset. They didn't offer me a slice, the meanies.

Sunset eventually started to approach, and it soon became apparent that the shoot was not going to be as easy as it could be. There's an unwritten rule that during sunset, to let people get on with taking their pictures in the limited time that's available you don't go and stand in front of the arch or get in the way of the view. You know the kind of thing - "Here's me in front of Delicate Arch at sunset! I couldn't understand why all these people with tripods kept shouting at me!". You can't blame people for not knowing about unwritten rules, but you'd also think that people would be at least a little self-conscious and work it out for themselves. A guy in a red T-shirt and his family decided to get in the way during the crucial couple of minutes, hanging around the arch and being conspicuous. It took surprisingly long for people to start yelling at them to get out of the way, but the frustration was evident in the way that after one person yelled, everyone else joined in...

Anyway, I got my pictures (see top of this entry), and seconds later the arch abruptly stopped being glowing and red and turned dull as the solar disc dropped below the horizon. Feeling energetic and full of the joys of being in such a landscape as that (or maybe it was just paranoia about not wanting to be stuck on the trail when it got properly dark), I found myself running all the way back down to the car. I must have looked like a bit of a berk, but made it in susprisingly good time considering I was wearing normal clothes and carrying a large camera. I was rewarded by arriving back at the trailhead several minutes before anyone else, and then rewarded further when I pulled the car out of the parking lot and immediately got stuck behind a large RV being inexpertly driven by someone who seemed to have the timidity many American drivers have when faced with roads which are curvy, steep or worst of all, curvy and steep. But by golly, Utah is a beautiful place.

Heading to Salt Lake City tomorrow, and will base myself there for a couple of nights. The Holiday Inn Express had an unreasonably good price on offer for a suite with its own hot tub ($79 - try getting a rate like that in the UK), so I couldn't resist the upgrade..

Posted by mpk at October 2, 2005 8:22 AM