In Utah, nobody can hear you scream

After a sensational afternoon and evening of successful time-lapse photography, excellent Navajo food, and a bottle of wine on a balcony overlooking monument valley I wouldn’t have been the least bit regretful if I’d set the alarm only to wake up to a scene of foggy bleakness, but thankfully my good luck continued – iridescent multicoloured bands of illuminated cloud rippled behind mesas, mittens and buttes, receding into distant, pre-dawn mist. What little life was left in my camera batteries was spent taking photos as fast as I could until the sun came up, and the warmth of the early rays cooled off into normal daylight. A sensational experience, and one I’d love to have the opportunity to experience again.

We had breakfast in the room, packed up suitcases, jackets, hiking boots and assorted frippery collected along the way which now threatened to overwhelm the boot and start spilling into the back seat, then drove from the visitors centre to the campground for a “3 mile” Wildcat Trail around West Mitten butte. Everything started beautifully, it was sunny yet cool – perfect walking weather – but somehow we missed a trail marker coming around the back of the butte and had to resort to a little off-road navigation over shale hillocks, sand dunes and low scrub, using our distant car on the mesa as a point of reference, before we finally made it back onto the trail. We arrived back at the car hot and tired, and it occurred to me this was still very early spring – I couldn’t begin to imagine how insufferably hot the valley floor would be in mid-summer. To say I’m staggered at the abilities of the Navajo to survive, and even thrive in this climate, is an understatement. Many of them living in the valley still exist much as they always have, many still without running water. Coming from our cool, air-conditioned resort, a little perspective is always a valuable thing.

I started the car and swung it’s heaving, wallowing bulk around to the north, and Moab, stopping fleetingly at Mexican Hat and Bluff then pressing on, bypassing Canyonlands National Park for another time, and ultimately, through bleary eyes, to Moab. The town has changed markedly since my last visit – what was a rather small, relatively non-descript town has grown dramatically, the streets busy with traffic, and clusters of new tourist, coffee and souvenir shops, and businesses offering tag a long 4WD, kayak, and white-water rafting tours of the Colorado River. It, now, is like Sedona was back in 2004. I can’t help but wonder if its growth will continue at the same furious pace, and when I next come to visit Moab I find I barely recognize the place, all over again.

After left briefly gasping for air at the cost of some of the hotels along the main street, we eventually checked into the Ramada Inn, and off-loaded a decent proportion of our ever burgeoning kit then headed for Arches National Park for a lightning visit in fading light. We drove toward the lower viewpoint of the famed, unofficial emblem of Utah – Delicate Arch – passing from wild red-rock country down through hills smeared with copper oxide the colour of bread mould, and thin, dark mottled patches of biological soil crust – a groundcover of cyanobacteria, mosses and fungi which slowly grow over hundreds of years, is destroyed with a single misplaced boot, and without which would cause death to the vast majority of desert plants in the region.

In increasingly blustery winds we clambered up slick-rock and irregular stairs chopped into the surrounding rock for a brief look, across a wild, windswept gorge, to Delicate Arch. In an environment of arches, Delicate Arch literally stands alone at the edge of a sweeping bowl of rock, unarguably the star attraction of Arches National Park and, quite probably, the single most famous rock arch on the planet.

We headed down along a slippery, dust-covered path – Jackson wiping out in spectacular fashion a couple of times – then continued onward to South and North Window arches through a landscape plagiarized from a Roadrunner and Wile-E-Coyote cartoon, stacked with hoodoos, arches, turrets, spires, balanced rocks, and abrupt mesas thrust up from the ground like remnant shards of broken glass left in a window-frame.

Thankfully luck was again on my side, the sun was playing ball, and I managed to capture some of its last scraps of goodwill on camera before it finally dipped below the horizon and we returned to the car, Moab, a couple of take-away Pizza’s from the friendly folk at Pasta Jays, and an early night in anticipation of a morning starring Turret Arch shimmering in alpenglow, a killer sunrise, and walls of red, red rock.