Monday 5th
On monday I awoke at dawn after a much better night`s sleep. The investment of a $10 airbed was well worth it. Washing in cold water under a dripping tap was not quite so much fun, though.
My day was spent seeing most of the Arches park, including a walk down Park Avenue, a ranger tour of the double Windows arches, marvelling at Balanced Rock, and finally enduring a hot and therefore difficult uphill hike to Delicate Arch. This is the most famous of the arches, and it Utah`s unofficial symbol, seen on their licence plates.
The arches are formed by rock cracking vertically when an underground salt deposit was washed away. The vertical cracks then eroded and widened, forming fins. The fins then in turn eroded inwards, forming beautiful, but fragile, arches. In fact they are still eroding and in 1991 a huge section of one arch fell off. They will probably all (all 2000) be gone before the next new arch forms, in my guess.
After hiking for a good 10 miles I called it a day at 5pm and read until dark, declining a dinner invitation back in town from a couple I met on the top of the mountain in favour of an early night. [Posthumous update: I regret that decision, it would have been great to have dined with them.]
The desert life is quite amazing. Despite not having much rainfall there is a plethora of flora. Juniper bushes, up to 500 years old, are everywhere, as well as adult oak tress just 18" high. Even the sand is alive, covered by a special type of cyrptobacteria that harden the crust, hold the sand`s shape, hold water in, and therefore are essential to life. A footprint in this may take 250 years to fix itself.
In the middle of the night I answered the call of nature and was floored by the night sky. In the absence of light pollution and air pollution, the sky at night is quite a different beast. Imagine the 50 or so major stars you can see on an average night - Orion, Ursa Major, etc. Then imagine a clear night at home, when you might see one or two thousand stars. Now intersperse these 2000 with about 5 or 6 times as many smaller, feinter stars, such that there are too many to even find the main constellations. It was just beautiful, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. (It helped to have been wearning my glasses and be sober; a similar sky was not fully appreciated by me in Costa Rica for these two problems).