Arches National Park is one of those parks that I feel everyone knows about or at least has elements that your average person will recognize. Whether it’s from reading Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire or from the massive amounts of images of it that circulate around social media. The latter of which would seriously bother Edward Abbey, who advocated for de-crowding America’s national parks, something I can get behind but feel somewhat hypocritical about after visiting twice on landscape photography expeditions. What can I say, I love capturing natural features and Arches has no shortage of them.
There are various natural rock arches to see, this park having the largest concentration of them in the world. The iconic Delicate Arch is the most popular for good reason. It is simply stunning and appears to have been man-made, whereas in reality this is an amazing example of the power of wind and water burrowing through “soft” rock, leaving whatever harder rock behind to form these natural structures (unfortunately to be eroded away in the distant future too).
Come for the sunset and watch the warm evening light brighten up the already deep red rock that covers most of the park. You may want to get there early to get a viewpoint.
