Arches in Winter

When I visited Delicate Arch in October, a group on a photography-magazine-sponsored tour was there. On the way out, the leader of the group, who was from Phoenix, said he'd like to come back when there's snow on the arch. I thought that sounded like a great idea.

So last week, with New Year's coming up, I thought this weekend would be a good time to take a trip to Moab. I called the Park Ranger for Arches and Canyonlands to see if Delicate Arch had snow, but all she would tell me was that the trail was clear (more on that below), but she didn't know whether the arch had snow. She said, "You'll just have to go up there and take your chances."

Well, I invited Randy, and Friday morning at 7:30 we headed to Moab in the Tahoe. The Weather Underground said Friday would be mostly cloudy, and Saturday would have a 30% chance of snow in Moab. That certainly wasn't ideal picture-taking weather, but we went anyway under cloudy skies, which got clearer as we travelled south.

Just before Helper (which is just before Price), there's a vein of coal in the mountain where it's been cut away for the highway. If I ever run out of heating fuel, I'm coming down to chip coal out of this highway--if I can get gas for my truck to get down here.

A ways past Wellington, which is just past Price, is this Christmas tree in the middle of nowhere. By the way, for something fun to do, call 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411), and ask for a number in Wellington, Utah. We tried this a few weeks ago, and the computerized operator kept saying, "Ok, Wellington, New Zealand" every time I said, "Welling, UTAH." Maybe the Google guys have fixed that by now.

I've never been to Arches in the winter, and we discovered that it is really beautiful in snow. I was surprised, first at how much snow there was--it must have snowed just a day or so ago--and how stunning the red rocks are under a white blanket.

The highways from Salt Lake to Moab were clear and dry, but the roads inside the park were snow packed and sometimes icy.

Red-rock mountain under a blanket of fresh snow.

Wow!

Once we got off I-70, everything south was in a fog bank, so it didn't look like we were going to get much of a view at Arches. But the fog cleared while we were goofing off in Moab, and there were just a few high clouds.

The bushes and sage brush were also encased in frozen fog and snow.

The trail to Delicate Arch was snow packed, but the only place that was icy was a stretch next to a rock where the sun had heated the rock, which melted the snow, and then it refroze. The steep slick-rock portion of the trail was also snow packed, but it wasn't icy, so hiking in wasn't bad at all. This is the end of the trail just before we turned the corner to Delicate Arch. (This is Randy's picture. That's me at the top of the trail.)

Even though we had all day to get here, we dilly-dallied in Moab quite a while and ended up getting here just in time to take pictures with the sun low in the sky. If you look closely, you can see people on the flat part of the rock on the right. That's where we took most of the pictures of the arch from. A lady who was here when we arrived warned me that getting to the spot where I took this picture from was "unnerving." You can see where the rock gets steep and snowy on the near right side. "Unnerving" was a good term.

This is the picture we came to Arches for on a snowy New Year's day. It turned out to be a nearly perfect outing.

It was also very, very cold. We dressed in layers and were fine, but an Indian guy who was here before us said he'd been here for three hours waiting to get a sundown picture. About 15 minutes before the sun got to its lowest point, before it went behind a cloud bank, he said he couldn't stand the cold anymore and left. He had waited three hours in the cold and missed the best 15 minutes of picture-taking. I offered to let him borrow my coat, since, after heating up on the hike in, I wasn't wearing it at the time, but he was too shy. And then I was glad he hadn't, because within 10 minutes the air cooled and added a light breeze, and I had to put my down coat over my fleece pullover, pull the ski mask up over my face, and trade my light gloves for ski gloves. A Chinese couple from San Jose was next to us. The guy also got too cold and headed back without his girlfriend, who endured until there was no more sun.

After the mile-and-a-half hike back to the car, when it had gotten pretty dark, I took off my fleece ski hat-mask and discovered it and the top of my fleece pullover were covered in heavy white frost. Thank goodness for the wicking power of modern fibers.

If you like Arches, and you ever get a chance to go just after it's snowed, I highly recommend Arches National Park in a blanket of snow. Beautiful scenery and few people. It doesn't get any better.