The Arches
The Arches is but a hop, a skip, and a jump outside of Moab proper.
Before I begin my discussion of the park, perhaps a short lesson in geology is appropriate. All of Utah was once part of a great sweeping desert in the early Jurassic, an series of steadily rolling dunes great enough to bury our own contemporary Sahel. These endless sandy dunes would form the mottled grey sandstone of the Navajo formation that underlies the park and much of the Colorado Plateau. A broad, shallow river would eventually wend its way between the dunes through the heart of this ancient desert, pushing slow rippled layers of yellowed silt into what would become the sandstone of the lower Entrada. It would be followed by the iron-tainted silica that gave the sandstone of the upper Entrada its warm red tint. Collectively, these strata are known as 'slickrock', and it is within these layers that we find the arches of the eponymous park.
I love slickrock. As it is built of fossilized sand-dunes, it has amazing traction, and I could run and jump carefree up and down their weird slopes all day long. That said, when wet, slickrock can truly earn its name - and it also occasionally peels off of the basal strata in small narrow sheets, like subscription cards falling from a magazine. If one is not careful, you might find yourself suddenly slipping down the hillside as your footing dances out from beneath you, and a spill upon slickrock is akin to dragging oneself along five or six feet of low-grade sandpaper. One learns to listen for a hollow drumming sound as you put your foot down, as this indicates a sheet eroding away from the main body... but frequent visitors bear the broad pink scars of their road rash as a masochistic badge of pride.
On our way into the park, we pass a small group of female and juvenile bighorn sheep grazing on the side of the the road. As the road into the park is surprisingly busy, and as I had expected them to be more prevalent within the park, we did not photograph them. I now regret that we did not stop to photograph the small herd, as they are far more uncommon than presumed. They are rare and secretive animals, usually avoiding the bustle of humanity, and this was to be our only encounter with the ungulates for the whole trip.