We spent the day at Arches National Park; after our exertions hiking out on the slickrock to see the Upheaval Dome area the day before, we were moving slower and somewhat painfully, so we took an “easy” day driving around part of the park and taking short spur hikes to see arches and interesting rocks. At one point we got into an area just off the road called “Sand Dune Arch” and luckily we had it to ourselves. It’s in an area of long, thin vertical fins of red sandstone, and there’s extremely fine red sand (or rock dust) underfoot. I was wearing Tevas and decided against putting my boots on, because the sand felt so soft and cool. The arch was only about a quarter of a mile from the road, so we walked in. The trail leads through a narrow slot entryway – when there’s sand on it the dark red sandstone is really slick.

Once we got in there, the light was incredible. It just glowed and bounced around. Everywhere I looked the stone flowed around us. It was warm in there but not that sheltered, because as it happened a big wind was coming from just the wrong direction – right down the narrow channels of stone. It was quiet and we were the only people in there. Everywhere we looked, there was something interesting happening with the shapes and the light and the textures. We both just prowled around, shooting whatever we saw and seeing new angles all around.

Finally we struggled up a very short, easy slope (damn fine sand, that) and found the arch. It was small and almost cozy and personal in a way. It was our arch for the moment, so we wandered around getting acquainted with it.

At least one of these images will end up getting printed out and framed, but I haven’t decided which. I really liked the sculptural feeling and of course the light bouncing off the back wall was nice, and different from the usual “blue turquoise in a coral necklace” look of the other arches shots I got that day, with blue sky showing behind orange stone. Of course, that color contrast is pretty too, but I like the diffuse look of these.

I liked these fallen chunks of conglomerate, too. You can see smaller stones embedded in them, and this one seems to cast off those stones in a pattern around the base as it erodes. David joked that we’d been transported to Mars. I suppose it would be funny to run a radio-controlled toy Mars Explorer up to the base of this one, but the place was so starkly beautiful that the joke would be in questionable taste.

I liked the background rocks and the grouping, too. In this one you can see tiny little ridges of cross-bedding – miniature sand dune layers from long ago.

It was a really neat place and I took more pictures and could have stayed longer, or hiked farther into the slot canyons. David liked it, too. However, the wind kept increasing. It was like being in a really, really big exfoliation chamber, in fact… the sand was everywere and constantly blowing in our eyes and up our shorts (and not in a good way). We decided enough was enough and we didn’t want to risk the stuff blowing into our cameras (I had to change cards at this point, not a good thing to do in blowing sand) so we walked back out. I was sorry to leave – it was a neat little place. As we got through the narrow entrance I passed a German guy on his way in with a big camera and told him he’d love the light in there. We chatted for a bit and then headed for the car… just as several cars rolled up and disgorged a motley band of folks that looked ill-prepared for running around in the desert. It was a good time to get away – our little mini-canyon retreat was about to be made hijjus with humanity.

Earlier in the morning we stopped off to see a few arches – we’d hiked all the way out to the famous Delicate Arch on a previous trip and weren’t up to that one, so we went to some of the “close in” ones. This one was at the end of a short trail past blooming cacti and other flowers, with lots of the “cryptobiotic” soil that Arches and Canyonlands are famous for.

The soil contains microorganisms that form dark, ruffled mats on the surface very slowly, with delicate buried fibrous structures that can be damaged with a single footstep that it can’t recover from for decades. At every trailhead, there are signs warning park visitors to stay on the trails and not to step into areas where the cryptobiotic soils are visible – or indeed even if they’re not visible, since they form so slowly. There’s some lightly cryptobiotic soil below the blue flowers in this image – I think the flowers may be some kind of lupine, but will have to look at them with book in hand later. The crypto soils are the darkly ruffled areas below the plants – you can even see that there’s just bare sand around the fallen yucca stem, so that when it fell it must have damaged the soil a bit. There were other areas where I saw what must have been very old cryptos – they were very dark and thick. This was in areas far from where humans would be likely to walk, far from any trailhead or point of interest that draws the average member of the traveling public.

And as always, evidence that many people are stupid.