Arches National Park

Where it sits. Arches National Park covers 310 square kilometres of high desert immediately north-east of Moab in Grand County, Utah, with its single entrance on U.S. 191 about 6 km from town. The park road climbs sharply from the Moab valley floor at 1,220 m onto a bench at around 1,500 m, and from there runs 29 km north to Devils Garden past almost everything the park is known for. To the east the snow-covered La Sal Mountains close the horizon; to the west the ground falls away to the Colorado River.

What built it. Everything here rests on a bed of salt several thousand metres thick, left behind when an inland sea evaporated some 300 million years ago. Salt deforms under pressure, and as thousands of metres of sandstone piled on top, the salt flowed and rose in domes, cracking the overlying Entrada Sandstone into long parallel fins. Water seeping into those joints froze, thawed and dissolved the calcium carbonate cement; the fins were hollowed out from within; and the survivors are arches. The park has more than 2,000 documented openings of at least a metre across, the densest concentration known anywhere on earth. They are not permanent: Wall Arch collapsed overnight in August 2008, and the same forces that opened every span here will eventually close it.

On screen. The opening twelve minutes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), in which a teenaged Indy played by River Phoenix finds looters excavating the Cross of Coronado, were filmed in Arches during the summer of 1988. The scouts ride in below the Windows Section, and the cave mouth the young Indy scrambles into is the alcove beneath Double Arch, in the Windows area about 4 km off the main park road. The cave interior itself was a set built in England, and the circus-train chase that follows was shot on the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad in southern Colorado - so the seamless Utah sequence is in fact three locations spliced together. The park has also appeared in Thelma & Louise (1991) and in a long line of car commercials.

What you actually see today. The road is the park, and it is worth doing slowly:

• Park Avenue, a 1.6 km one-way walk between vertical fins that genuinely resemble a street of skyscrapers
• Balanced Rock, a 3,600-tonne boulder of Entrada Sandstone on a slender pedestal, right beside the road
• The Windows Section, where North Window, South Window, Turret Arch and Double Arch cluster within a kilometre of one another on flat, easy trails
• Delicate Arch, the 14 m free-standing span on the Utah number plate, reached by a 4.8 km return walk with 145 m of climbing across open slickrock and no shade
• Devils Garden, at the end of the road, where a 3 km trail leads to Landscape Arch - at 88 m the longest span in North America, and so thin after a 1991 rockfall that the ground beneath it is permanently closed

Practical notes. The park has run a timed-entry reservation system in the high season since 2022, generally covering daytime arrivals from spring through autumn; tickets are released online in advance plus a small number the previous evening, and they are separate from the entrance fee. Arriving before the window opens in the early morning, or after it closes in the late afternoon, avoids the requirement altogether and gives far better light. There is one campground, Devils Garden, with 51 sites that book out months ahead, and there is no fuel, no food and effectively no shade anywhere inside the boundary. Water is available only at the visitor centre and the campground.

Getting there and timing. Moab, 6 km south, is the practical base; Canyonlands Regional Airport is 25 km north and Grand Junction, Colorado, about 180 km away. April to May and September to October give daytime temperatures between 18C and 28C. Midsummer regularly exceeds 38C on unshaded slickrock, and the Delicate Arch trail in July has produced repeated heat-related rescues. Winter is superb and quiet, though the trail to Delicate Arch turns to ice on its final ledge. The classic photograph of that arch is taken in the last twenty minutes of daylight, when the low sun sets the sandstone alight and the La Sal Mountains stand snow-covered behind it - and you will be sharing the bowl with a hundred other tripods. The nearest thing to solitude in the park is the Fiery Furnace, a labyrinth of fins open only on a ranger-led walk or with a self-guided permit issued in small daily numbers.