The Arches
A million years of bitter winters and scorching summers eventually cracked open the sandstone plateau which sits high above the town of Moab. As water and sediment flowed down through the gaps, the long, slow creation of this epic landscape began. Rain waters froze, expanded, and forced open the cracks in tall vertical lines, cutting through the entire slab of stone. Once the ice melted, water could run freely through the rock, collecting an abrasive mixture of sandstone particles which wore away at the walls of the ever widening channels.
What remains are immense fins of sandstone, each the size of a skyscraper laid gently on its side, with wide crevasses carved out between them like streets, avenues and alleyways. Through these streets howls a chilled desert wind laced with grit and sand whipped up from the ground. Like eddies in a river, the wind collects and swirls in shady corners, blasting at the walls and creating ever growing indentations and bowls in the rock, deepening over the centuries. And eventually, with the unimaginable determination of nature, these scrapings reach right through an entire vertical slab of rock, leaving us with the arches. Curved, twisted bridges of stone stretched over impossibly wide voids. A soaring masterpiece ready to crack and drop at any moment as the rain and wind continue to whittle away at their expanse.
Canyonlands
This is the Old West as seen by the world in countless black and white Cowboy & Indian movies. Sweeping grassy plains dotted with horses lay in the shadows of (motion) picture perfect castles of crumbling rock. Through the valley, rising up from a crisp blue horizon, snow-capped peaks shimmer in the heat haze like a cardboard backdrop lowered on ropes and chains. The sky swells as yet another dust devil begins its slow arc across the desert, scattering the tumble weed and sending glossy black horses galloping into the distance.
Capitol Reef
As the earth buckled, twisted and crashed together in the formation of the American continent, slabs of rock, each the size of Manhattan, tilted, rose up like waves and crashed down on one another in infinite slow motion. Now they lay stacked on top of each other like a row of fallen dominoes. The Capitol Reef National Park now sits entirely at a slant with each flat, tree dotted plateau jacked up on one side, bordered by sheer faces of rock to the west and wedged beneath the peach pink cliffs of its neighbour to the east. The long cliff faces resemble the walls of ancient cities buried beneath an all consuming layer of solidified sand and clay. Like staring at clouds, eventually one begins to see pillars, beams, balconies, alters, even grand staircases sweeping up to immense doorways flanked by statues of gods and goddesses.
Bryce Canyon
Like the Arches, this park is a maze carved out of the earth. Here, instead of fins and arches, the soft clay eroded into tall towers, each uniformly striped with the pinks, whites and reds of the layer of earth from which they were cast. The pioneers who discovered the area called these human-like spires 'hoodoos', believing them to be a collection of magical, mythical sentinels guarding the area. As the sun sinks and cool shadows creep far across the park, the outlines of human bodies, arms, legs and faces, start to appear in the crumbling formations. The high walls of the canyon wrap around the scene like an ancient Greek amphitheatre complete with arches and windows from which an emperor might sit and inspect the ranks of stone warriors standing in perfect formations on the arena floor below.
Zion
Gouged out by the sparkling blue Virgin River and dressed in a thick blanket of pine trees, Zion Canyon runs between two rows of mountainous, near vertical slabs of stone towering several thousand feet above the valley floor. Having climbed the steep footpath to Angel's Landing (a narrow ledge of rock sticking out high above the park with dizzying drops either side), we lay down on our stomachs and shuffled our bodies towards the edge, the warm sun beaming down onto our backs. Peeking our noses over, the earth dropped away below us in an instant. Our gasps tumbled downwards over the cliff face, stopping far, far below where the gushing river, now just a glinting stream of silver, twisted and turned through the canyon and into the late afternoon haze which had settled over the valley.
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