Читать книгу 50 Best Short Hikes in Utah's National Parks - Greg Witt - Страница 15

ARCHES NATIONAL PARK

Park Overview

Arches National Park showcases the highest concentration of natural stone arches in the world—more than 2,400 of them. Along with the arches, you’re treated to an amazing landscape of balanced rocks, soaring red-rock cliffs, monumental towers, and stately sandstone fins. It’s inspiring scenery, with routes that are accessible to hikers of all ages and skill levels.

The arches and varied landforms spawn from an underground salt bed deposited 300 million years ago, when a sea flowed into the region and then evaporated. Subsequently, residue from floods, winds, and the ocean covered the salt bed and became compressed as rock, up to a mile thick in some places. Under this heavy rock layer, the salt bed shifted, liquefied, and buckled, causing domes to form and vertical cracks to appear in what we now see as fins.

Before being designated as a national monument in 1929 and a national park in 1971, the area had been inhabited for nearly 10,000 years, most recently by Fremont Indians and ancestral Puebloans, followed by Paiute and Ute tribes, Spanish missionaries, and Mormon pioneers.

JUST ONE DAY?

Arches is a compact park, ideally suited for visitors who want to take in the natural spectacle on short walks and hikes. Starting at the visitor center, continue into the park on what may be the most dramatic entrance to any national park in America as you ascend a road cut through sandstone to the Park Avenue Viewpoint. Continue on to Balanced Rock for a quick leg-stretcher, and then travel into the Windows section for a walk to the North and South Windows before heading up to Double Arch.

The must-do hike in Arches is Delicate Arch, the most iconic arch in Utah, if not the world. If you have any time and energy remaining, head to Devils Garden and pay a visit to Landscape Arch—quickly, before it collapses. This seemingly razor-thin span of rock continues to defy gravity and delight visitors.

Park Avenue