Moab, UT - Arches National Park

Moab, Utah - we originally picked this place out from articles written in camping travel magazines. It's a tourist oriented town, in Utah red rock country, near several national parks and monuments. Our stay was everything we expected and more.

The first day we went into Arches National Park just north of town. The road into the park begins at the bottom of the Moab fault, where a valley collapsed as the plate collisions raised mountains on either side (100's of millions of years ago). As the road reaches the top of the mesa, rock formations like these rise out of the earth. We kept asking ourselves, "how could this happen?".

The official explanation from the guidebooks and park videos is that great oceans flooded the area several times over millions of years depositing salt layers thousands of feet thick. Minerals from higher elevations deposited over the salt and when the plates moved, cracks appeared that allowed water over the years to dissolve the salt layers, leaving the rocks. Water and wind erosion did the rest. We just marveled that a higher being allowed mother nature to create such beauty.

The arches were formed as water seeped into cracks in the

narrower sections of the "fins" and froze and broke pieces out of the formation. A ranger told us that a large piece fell out of the

overhang on the arch to the right two years ago.

More on this beautiful and exotic landscape next.