Arches National Park: the park road from the visitor center to Devils Garden

Next, we're heading to Park Avenue, the first big view in the park. Along the way, here's how this place came to be protected.

In 1911, an eighteen-year-old named Loren Taylor, known to everyone as Bish, took over the newspaper in Moab. For years he wrote about the marvels of the rock country just north of town, and he loved exploring it. Some of those trips were with the town's first doctor, John Williams, known as Doc. Riding his horse out to distant ranches, Doc would often climb out of Salt Valley to a high point, rest his horse, and look back over the colored fins of rock. That spot is now called Doc Williams Point.

Word spread. In 1923, a prospector named Alexander Ringhoffer wrote to the Rio Grande Western Railroad, hoping to publicize the area and win support for a national park. He led railroad executives on hikes into the formations. They were impressed, and they believed wonders like these would bring the railroad more customers. A campaign began, and the government sent research teams to see for themselves.

On April 12, 1929, President Herbert Hoover signed the proclamation that created Arches National Monument. It started small, and its boundaries have been expanded several times since. In 1971, Congress made it a national park, recognizing more than ten thousand years of human history in this landscape of rock.

A newspaperman, a country doctor and a prospector. Between them, they made sure the rest of us would get to see it.

Next, we're heading to a viewpoint named for the mountains on the skyline. Their name is one of the oldest on the map here. In Spanish times, the range was known as the Sierra La Sal, the Salt Mountains, and it was a landmark for travelers on the Old Spanish Trail between Santa Fe and Los Angeles.

Those peaks aren't made of the sandstone around you. They formed around molten rock that pushed up underground about twenty-five to twenty-eight million years ago. The softer rock around it wore away, and the mountains were left standing.

Next, we're heading to Courthouse Towers. Long before there was a park here, travelers passed through this country, and one of them signed his name.

Denis Julien was a French-American fur trapper with a habit of chiseling his name and the date into rocks across the Southwest. He left one of those inscriptions in this area on June 9, 1844. It's the first known date for an explorer within what is now the park. He was over sixty years old at the time, trapping beaver, whose pelts were prized because of a fashion in men's hats.

Settlers were slower to stay. In 1855, the Latter-day Saints set up an outpost called the Elk Mountain Mission, where Moab is now, but conflicts with the local Utes led them to abandon it. The valley wasn't settled again until the 1880s and 1890s, by a mix of ranchers, prospectors and farmers.

Next, we're heading to the Petrified Dunes viewpoint. The first people who came to this country weren't sightseeing.

Hunter-gatherers moved into the area about ten thousand years ago, at the end of an ice age. Exploring Courthouse Wash and Salt Valley, they found pockets of chert and chalcedony, two kinds of quartz that are perfect for making stone tools. They chipped them into dart points, knives and scrapers, and the piles of chips they left are still visible to a trained eye.

Roughly two thousand years ago, people in the Four Corners region began to farm maize, beans and squash and to settle in villages, like the ones preserved at Mesa Verde. These ancestral Puebloans reached the northern edge of their territory here. Few of their dwellings have been found in the park, so they may have come only seasonally. But they left rock art, and stone chips near waterholes, where someone may have shaped tools while watching for game. The Fremont people lived just to the northwest at the same time.

About seven hundred years ago, people began leaving the region. Their descendants live today in pueblos like Acoma and Taos, and on the Hopi Mesas. As they left, nomadic peoples such as the Ute and Paiute moved in, and they were here to meet the first Europeans.

The park acknowledges this land as the ancestral and traditional homeland of many Tribes, the Navajo Nation and the Zuni among them. The people who came first never really left the story.

Next, we're heading to Balanced Rock. In the 1950s, a young park ranger lived in its shadow.

Edward Abbey worked two seasons at Arches, in 1956 and 1957, living in what he called a little tin government housetrailer near Balanced Rock. Out of those two seasons came his best-known book, Desert Solitaire. The Arches in its pages no longer exists: a little-known monument at the end of a little-used dirt road.

He loved this desert fiercely, and he argued just as fiercely against developing it. He feared the growth of what he called industrial tourism. Not everyone agrees with what he said. The road is paved now, and the park is world famous. But his book has become standard reading for anyone who loves the solitude of this country.

Here's how he described it, in 1968. The desert, he wrote, wears a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent, it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act, it seems to be waiting. But waiting for what?

Keep that question with you. The rock you're about to see has been waiting a very long time.

Next, we're heading to the Windows Section, one of the two places this park was built around.

When President Hoover created Arches National Monument in 1929, he set aside just two pieces of land: nineteen hundred and twenty acres in the Windows, and twenty-six hundred acres in Devils Garden. Everything else came later.

In 1933 and 1934, a scientific expedition came to study the new monument. Its leader wrote that these arches are of thrilling beauty, and he believed they had been cut by wind-blown sand, not by running water. The park tells a different story today. Water shapes this landscape more than any other force: rain soaking in and loosening the sandstone, and winter ice prying it apart.

That expedition had no idea how many arches it was looking at, either. As recently as 1970, official literature said the park held nearly ninety arches. Then came the arch hunters. Beginning in 1973, a geography professor named Dale Stevens led the first scientific study of the arches here, with a standard method for measuring and recording them. A ranger named Ed McCarrick, who worked here in the 1970s and 1980s, documented many more, and so did other searchers, one family database at a time. Three decades of exploring put many new arches on the map. Today the count is more than two thousand.

The park asks a good question about that. Do you think they've all been found?

Next, we're heading to Panorama Point. From there you can see across a big piece of the park, which makes this a good moment to ask why there are so many arches here, and not everywhere else in the desert. The park's answer starts deep underground, with salt.

Far beneath the surface lies a thick layer of salt. Squeezed by the tons of rock above it, the salt flowed and bulged upward, forming long domes. The rock layers on top had to crack, like the crust of a fresh loaf of bread, into a series of more or less parallel lines. Those cracks are the blueprint for fins, and fins are the raw material for arches.

Then the whole region began to rise, from sea level to thousands of feet, and erosion went to work. The layers you see today were once buried under more than a mile of other rock, which all had to wear away first.

Next, it takes just the right amount of rain. The park gets about eight to ten inches a year. Rainwater soaks into the porous sandstone and slowly dissolves the natural cement that holds the grains together, rotting the rock from the inside out. With much more rain, the sandstone might wear away before arches had time to form. With none, erosion would stop.

Finally, the ground has to hold still. Earthquakes are rare here, and the fact that more than two thousand arches still stand tells us this area has been fairly stable for at least fifty thousand years.

Salt below, the right rock on top, a little rain, and a lot of patience: that's the whole recipe for an arch.

Next, we're heading to Wolfe Ranch, and the family who lived here before it was a park.

In 1898, a Civil War veteran named John Wesley Wolfe was sixty-nine years old, with a leg injury from the war that wouldn't stop nagging him. Looking for a drier climate, he left his wife and three of his children in Ohio and came west with his oldest son, Fred. The two of them settled more than a hundred acres along Salt Wash, close to a fresh-water spring.

For nearly a decade they lived and worked alone on their remote ranch, the Bar DX, eventually grazing more than a thousand head of cattle on the native grasses that once covered this area. A dam on the wash watered a garden of root vegetables, pumpkins and melons. About once every three months they ordered groceries from the Sears, Roebuck catalog and picked them up at the railroad station in Thompson Springs, a full day's wagon trip away.

In 1906, John's daughter Flora arrived with her husband, Ed Stanley, and their two young children. Flora was appalled at how her father and brother were living, and she demanded a proper cabin, with a wooden floor and real windows. John built it. Because she disliked eating off tin plates, he ordered a hundred-piece set of blue china from Sears. And he surprised her with a camera and a developing kit. Flora used it well. She took one of the earliest known photographs of Delicate Arch.

In 1908 the Stanleys moved to town so the children could go to school, and John and Fred followed two years later. In 1910 Wolfe sold the ranch, and the family eventually moved back to Ohio, where he died in 1913, at eighty-four. A few years later, the ranch was bought by Marvin Turnbow, the first custodian of Arches National Monument.

The park is frank about the ranch's legacy. Decades after grazing ended, native grasses here are still sparse, and in places gone. It may be years, if ever, before this land looks the way it did when the Wolfes, or the people before them, first saw it.

Next, we're heading to the Delicate Arch viewpoints. Of the more than two thousand arches in this park, this is the one people cross the world to see. It has become a widely recognized symbol of the state of Utah, and one of the most famous geologic features anywhere.

It hasn't always had that name. Over the years it has been called Cowboy's Chaps and Old Maid's Bloomers, and, more plainly, Salt Wash Arch. The word delicate first appeared in January 1934, in an article about the scientific expedition to the new monument, which called it the most delicately chiseled arch in the entire area. That one stuck.

It stands on its own, free of any wall: the largest free-standing arch in the park. Most of it is Entrada Sandstone, the layer that holds most of the arches here. Its upper part is a paler sandstone, the same layer that caps the walls and fins of Devils Garden.

Next, we're heading to the Fiery Furnace viewpoint. The Fiery Furnace is a natural labyrinth: a maze of narrow passages between towering sandstone walls.

Going in is unlike any other hike in the park. You can only enter with a ranger on a guided hike, or with a self-guided permit, and both have to be reserved ahead of time through Recreation dot gov. Inside there are many possible routes and plenty of dead ends, and it's easy to get lost. GPS units don't work well among the tall walls, so the park warns against relying on them. Small markers show one route, counter-clockwise, and that's all.

The ranger-led hikes are demanding. You walk on broken sandstone, along narrow ledges above drop-offs, and through loose sand. There are gaps to jump across and tight places you have to squeeze into and pull yourself up through. In some spots, you hold yourself off the ground by pushing against the walls with your hands and feet. Because it's a maze, everyone who goes in has to finish the hike, and children under five aren't allowed.

For first-timers, the park recommends going with a ranger, or with someone who has been before. Either way, it's a place that rewards care, and punishes guessing.

Next, we're heading to Skyline Arch. Before we get there, here's how an arch is actually made.

It starts with a fin, one of those narrow walls of sandstone left standing between parallel cracks. Rain soaks easily into the porous Entrada Sandstone, but the layer just beneath it, a denser mix of sand and clay, holds the water back. Water collects just above that layer and slowly dissolves the calcite that binds the sand grains, eating out a cavity, like food trapped between your teeth. In winter, the water trapped there freezes, expands and pries the rock apart. Small recesses grow bigger with every storm, until one day there's daylight all the way through.

Arches can also start from the top. Near the edge of a cliff, potholes can grow deeper and deeper until they wear right through the wall below them.

Not every hole counts. To be one of the park's official arches, an opening has to measure at least three feet in some direction. There's no rule about width. Many arches are so thin you have to put your cheek against the rock to see the light.

Skyline Arch shows what can happen next in an arch's life, and it happened all at once.

Next, we're heading to Devils Garden, at the end of the road, and the second of the two pieces of land first protected in 1929.

It's known for its fins: a large concentration of narrow rock walls, standing side by side. They formed when rainwater wore away the parallel cracks left by the salt pushing up from below. In time, fins give way to arches, like Landscape Arch, the crown jewel of this part of the park.