(Dobbs) Mother Nature's Lasting Power
Grateful for the leaders who had the foresight to create our national parks.
This column is a departure from the norm. I’m not writing today about politics or war (or am I repeating myself?).
No, this one’s about beauty. Majesty. Wonderment. It’s about Arches National Park in southeastern Utah.
More than 35 years since our last visit, my wife and I just spent a few days there. And came home with a lot of pictures. For a landscape shaped some 300 million years ago, it was no surprise that almost nothing had changed.
For example, although it seems to defy gravity, Balanced Rock is still standing.
Someday it will fall, but not because of gravity. It will fall because the boulder at the apex, 55 feet from bottom to top (in other words, that rock on top is like a five-story building), is made of stronger stone, created in a different geological era, than the 73-foot-high pillar (now think of a seven-story building) that supports it. It will fall because eventually the softer pillar will erode until it crumbles, and the 3,500-ton rock on top will come tumbling down.
As the National Park Service puts it, “All rock formations at Arches National Park are temporary features on the landscape.” Wind and water transform the sandstone. Although imperceptible in a human lifetime, every feature in Arches will change. That’s why, some day, Delicate Arch— 46 feet high and 32 wide, the most famous feature in the park— will crumble too.
When it does, Utah will have to look for a new symbol for the Beehive State, for it is Delicate Arch that adorns Utah’s license plates. Of course that might be a thousand years from now, so they don’t need to rush.
Within our lifetime, there’s one major feature in the park that has changed before our eyes. It’s called Landscape Arch.
In 1991, a 60-foot slab of stone came down— you can see the sharp edges on both sides where it peeled off. There were tourists who saw it but thankfully none was close enough to get hurt. Landscape Arch is still 306 feet wide— that’s longer than a football field— but as geologists calculate it, it is now 180 tons lighter.
There are more than 2,000 stone arches in Arches— and almost countless other formations of every shape and size in this 120 square mile national treasure. Everywhere you turn, you feel like you’re a character in a colossal Rorschach inkblot test.
Would everyone see the elephant I see here?
Or these shapes, reminiscent of those familiar figures from Easter Island?
Evidently everyone does see the same thing in this formation, 350 feet tall at its highest point, which is aptly known as the Three Gossips.
Scale can be hard to convey. This is my wife Carol in Turret Arch.
This is me in North Windows Arch.
Arches National Park has only one road in… and the same road back out. As we approached the end of it, about 20 miles from the entrance, the cars in the parking area at the foot of several trails did as good a job as anything of telling the story of scale.
Geologists say, this landscape was created in that Jurassic Age hundreds of millions of years ago when much of this area was part of a great inland sea, and a volcano erupted. It was rich with iron, which oxidized to create the rust-colored features of the park. But some panoramas are more green-colored than rust.
If you’re guessing lichen or moss, you’ve wasted a guess. In these parts of the park, where the volcanic ash penetrated the water, it didn’t oxidize, and green is what it left behind.
But no matter the color, the scenery in Arches is without parallel. The word “awesome” these days is much abused, but “awesome” has its rightful place here….
…. even where you park.
Our nation is blessed with magnificent national parks, from Glacier to Great Smoky, Yosemite to Yellowstone. Arches has a place in that pantheon.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
You must have had fun being there, and writing this.
Delightful piece. Thanks Greg