After yesterday’s “audible call” for a wonderful tour detour to Capitol Reef, today we are back on track and ready to visit Park # 13, Arches National Park. Some superstition kicks in, and we are a little nervous about stopping on this number, but a quick search doesn’t show another park even close to our planned route home. Guess we will end our adventures with lucky # 13.
We have had more rain overnight and for the first time, we start our day with cloudy skies, cooler temperatures and most of us have jackets on. There are no food establishments in the park, so we stop at the market to pick up sandwiches and plan to picnic in the park.
Arches is another of the smaller parks and if you don’t plan to hike, it is basically a one way drive in and same way out. The Arches encompasses yet another strange set of rock formations, unlike most we have seen in any other park. From Fodor’s.com/parks comes this description: “In Arches National Park some of the most unimaginable rock formations in the world stand in testimony to the power behind the Earth’s movement and erosional forces.”
The park lies atop an underground salt bed that is responsible for the arches, spires, balanced rocks, sandstone fins and eroded monoliths of this mecca for sightseers. Thousands of feet thick in places, this salt bed was deposited across the Colorado Plateau 300 million years ago when a sea flowed into the region and eventually evaporated. Over millions of years, the debris was compressed as rock, possibly a mile thick. Salt under pressure is unstable and the pressure of the rock caused the salt to shift, buckle, liquefy, and reposition itself, thrusting the rock layers upward as domes and cavities. Today the layers of Navajo Sandstone and Entrada Sandstone stand much like a layer cake across the park.
The park showcases over 2, 000 arches. To be defined as an arch, a rock opening must be in a continuous wall of rock and have a minimum opening of 3 feet in any one direction. With this clear definition in mind, we start the hunt for the first of 2,000 arches. We eventually find some that meet the criteria, and we stop for the obligatory photo op. However, as the morning progresses, we find ourselves coming up way short of 2,000 arches. In the rain, hiking is not an option for the girls, and we leave it up to the guys to get the photos. Numerous rock formations have been named by some unknown naming committee, and we have even more fun naming some of our own.
As we all tried for the perfect photos to match those in the travel guides, we are totally convinced that those must have been taken by photographers with off-road permits to places we are not allowed. There is just no way we can make our photos look like theirs, and we can’t blame a cloudy, rainy day either. 
Some of our favorite rocks were this lovely turquoise color which we found out were colored sandstone with chlorite or iron silicate.
Throughout the park, there are huge boulders that have tumbled from their perches who knows how many years ago.
As we exited the park, someone’s sharp eye spotted two climbers and we had to stop to photograph and watch a bit. Climbing is permitted in the park, but not on any structures named on the USGS maps. ( Geological Survey) 
While our photos may not be perfect, we all have those precious memories that can never be taken from us nor duplicated by any technology. Lydia brought the Purdue flag along on the trip so we could take our photo with it, and it looks like we have waited until nearly the last day and in the rain at that, but we still make the effort.
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