Tag Archives: Balanced Rock

Balanced Rock

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The first major attraction The Lady of the House and I visited at Arches National Park was Balanced Rock. The rock is balanced because two kinds of stones are eroding at different rates. A sign at the trailhead explains “The caprock of the hard Slick Rock Member of the Entrada Sandstone is perched upon a pedestal of mudstone. This softer Dewey Bridge Member of the Carmel Formation weathers more quickly than the resistant rock above. Eventually the faster eroding Dewey Bridge will cause the collapse of Balanced Rock.”

At Arches, visitors are not supposed to climb on any formation with a name. A sign at the trailhead of this particular formation specifically declares in red print, “Climbing on Balanced Rock or its base is prohibited.” The day we visited, two young men had either failed to get the message or just didn’t care because they had climbed Balanced Rock. They were a good ways up the Dewey Bridge Member, looking like tiny insects high on the formation.

Can you see the tiny little man in the neon yellow shirt way up there on Balanced Rock?

I was worried for the safety of the young men, and I was perturbed by their flagrant disregard of the rules. I’m not one for rules for their own sake, but I’m sure people climbing on the rocks wear them down, and even minute damage would be amplified if only a fraction of the one million visitors each year climbed on them. Prohibiting visitors from climbing on the popular, easily accessible formations certainly protects the rocks. The prohibition against climbing surely helps people too. It’s all fun and games until someone slips and falls from 50 feet up, crashes to the ground smashing his/her skull and other important bones, and lies on the ground in excruciating pain while waiting for an ambulance to make a thirty minute drive into and through the park so the EMTs can load the injured party into the ambulance for a ride to the nearest hospital.

On the other hand, it was exhilarating to watch those bold souls standing so high on Balanced Rock. Of course, I knew the rocks were massive, but seeing humans scrambling around on them helped me understand how huge they really were. The young men were nearly insignificant next to the immensity of the rocks.

I was relieved when the young men returned to the ground. Even though they were rule breakers and daredevils, I didn’t want to see them fall. They may have been wrong to climb balanced Rock but the story of their visit is exceedingly more exciting than my story.

Balanced Rock from a different vantage point

There’s an easy path around Balanced Rock, and The Lady and I walked it so we could look at the formation from many different angles. I was amazed by how different the formation looked depending on where we stood in relation to it. Of course, I had a theoretical understanding of how the look of something changes in relation to the viewer’s proximity to it, but it was fascinating to experience the phenomenon myself in relation to Balanced Rock.

One day, the underlying layer of mudstone will erode to the point it can no longer support the caprock of Entrada sandstone, and the caprock will fall to the ground. How soon that will happen, no one knows. What if it happens within our lifetime? The Lady and I asked each other. We agreed we were glad we’d seen it as it stood on the early April day of 2018, and we’d be even happier to have seen it if the capstone falls during our lifetimes.

Do you think they’ll change its name when the top stone falls? we wondered.

The Park Service will have to post new informational signs if the capstone falls. Of course, Balanced Rock may stay balanced for a good long time. When it falls, there may no longer be a Park Service or a United States of America or civilization as we know it. It may fall in a lonely landscape with no humans around to see or hear the first moments in its next state of existence.

I took all the photos in this post.

 

 

Arches National Park

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The Lady of the House and I got to Arches National Park early in the afternoon. Once again, I was impressed by the rock formations visible from the parking lot near the visitor center, and once again, The Lady gave me a knowing smile. She’d visited this park the previous summer, and she knew what magnificence I would see shortly.

We didn’t see this formation from the visitor center, but I think it was one of the nameless formations that impressed me.

During The Lady’s visit the previous July, she and her companions had hiked to Delicate Arch. She said it had taken them about three hours to hike to the Arch and back. The trail was in the direct sun, she reported, and they were quite tired by the time they returned to the car. While I would have liked to see the iconic landmark up close, I didn’t really want to use my one day in the Park getting there and back. The Lady said there was a viewpoint a short walk from a parking area where we could see Delicate Arch from a distance. I decided seeing it from a distance was good enough for me if that meant I could also see other fantastic natural beauty in the Park.

From the visitor center, I drove the van up up up on the narrow, winding road. I mostly kept my eyes in front of me, but my furtive glances to the side showed me the deep drop to the world below. Arches National Park really is above it all.

Balanced Rock

Our first stop was at the Courthouse Towers area. I felt so tiny surrounded by ever taller rock formations. I already felt like I was literally on top of the world, yet the world rose up taller around me. How was a person from the flatlands (even someone like me who’d been living among mountains for some years) supposed to make sense of this geology?

Our next stop was Balanced Rock. One day the top rock will fall, and I’ll feel grateful I was able to experience the formation when it was all in one piece. Will they rename the formation when the top rock falls? Will we call it “Formerly Balanced Rock” or “Fallen Rock” or “The Rock Formerly Known as Balanced”?

After walking the short trail around Balanced Rock, I drove us to the parking area with Double Arch on one side and The Windows Trail on the other. We decided not to walk the trail to Double Arch, but I was able to snap a decent photo of it.

The walk to the North and South Window Arches was not very strenuous, and the visual payoff was fantastic! Across from the Window Arches is the Turret Arch, so a visitor gets to see three thrilling formations for one expenditure of energy.

Double Arch

Back in the van, I drove to the Fiery Furnace lookout. The trail here is apparently quite challenging. A limited number of permits for self-guided hikes are issued each day, or folks can go on ranger-led tours of the area. The Lady and I had signed up for neither due to time constraints (and my probable inability to enjoy a quite strenuous hike). So we contented ourselves with stopping briefly and taking some photos.

Our final destination of the day was the Delicate Arch viewpoint.

Before we got on the trail to the viewpoint, we saw a rustic cabin that I wanted to take a closer look at. The National Park Service says it was built in 1906 by John Wesley Wolfe to please his daughter Flora. The Lady maintained Edward Abbey stayed in this cabin during his two seasons (1956 and 1957) as a park ranger at Arches, but I could find no official information confirming that assertion. (Once back home, The Man of the House, who was then reading Desert Solitaire, said Abbey spent a night or two in the cabin during his time in the park, but hadn’t lived there extensively as I had imagined when The Lady said he’d stayed there. I think there should be signage saying “Edward Abbey slept here” or something to that effect.)

Turnbow Cabin, part of the Wolfe Ranch. Edward Abbey slept here, maybe once or twice.

I looked at the cabin and thought, I could live here, although hauling water would probably be quite an endeavor, and I bet it’s dark out there at night. Of course, it’s probably hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but I could imagine myself living there. I wonder how many other visitors even consider the place as a possible dwelling for themselves.

We took a short walk to the viewing area, and there it was—Delicate Arch. It didn’t look so big from where we were standing, but The Lady assured me it’s huge when one is standing right under it. The informational sign says the Arch’s opening is 45 feet high and 33 feet wide. That’s pretty dang big! The Lady pointed out the people standing around the Arch; they looked like tiny colorful specks, as if someone had thrown confetti around the formation.

Delicate Arch, from a distance

We contemplated Delicate Arch for a few minutes. It’s “carved in Entrada Sandstone”, the sign says, and “is composed mostly of the Slick Rock Member. The top is a five-foot thick layer of Moab Tongue.” I zoomed my camera’s lens in for a few grainy photos. Maybe someday I’ll hike out and see Delicate Arch up close, but in the meantime, I’ll revisit it on nearly every Utah license plate I see.

I took all the photos in this post.