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Dee Blair: The View From Sunnybank

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April 24, 2011

View From Sunnybank: Utah's revelations

By DEE BLAIR Local Columnist

Yesterday, from well before dawn to 6:58 a.m., Joe and I watched the earth move.

We're in Moab, Utah, (maybe twice as large as Elk Rapids) for a week of hiking in Arches National Park, five miles north of town. It's located on the spectacular 130,000-square-mile Colorado Plateau, which contains the greatest concentration of national and state parks, national forests and wilderness areas in this nation.

Photos and movies don't really capture what's here. It must be witnessed. I've seen the Grand Canyon, but this ...

Descriptive adjectives -- like "marvelous" and "stunning" -- don't satisfy, leaving me frustrated. Ah, well.

We woke yesterday at 4:30 a.m., dressed warmly and drove into the park, ascending to over 5000 feet above sea level. A spot near a sheer drop provided an excellent place to star-gaze and observe the sunrise. We were alone. Immense sandstone cliffs and towering bluffs were silhouettes in the blackness behind us. The heavens were simply crammed with diamonds. No city lights diminished their glory.

The silence was profound.

The temperature registered at 35 degrees just before dawn. (The earth would warm to the high 70s by afternoon; three layers of clothing would be stuffed into our backpacks a few hours later.) Black sky lightened to blue, shot with pink and purple. The distant, snow-dappled La Sal Mountain range provided a stunning backdrop for this fantastic scene.

Standing there, we saw our planet inexorably rotate, exposing this part of the globe to morning. Turning at 24,000 miles an hour, Earth appeared to dump the huge full moon into the western horizon. Emerging sunlight efficiently erased the stars. Vivid Venus, nearly on the southeastern horizon at 4:30 a.m., fled high into the blue and vanished as the eye-searing fireball was fully revealed, forcing us to look away.

It was a spiritual experience.

Motoring further into the park we hiked a high desert trail toward a crop of impressive, distant bluffs. There was no wind; there were no people. Pausing frequently to sip water and appreciate, we became part of a giant, colorful still life. Encroaching sunlight brightened the desert floor and enhanced the massive pinnacles' honey, ochre, orange and cream hues.

Reaching the bluffs we scrambled over slanted rock slabs and massive boulders to a flat place to eat our breakfasts and absorb the vast panorama.

Arches Park's 150-million-year-old sandstone walls, called fins, are lined up like soldiers. Grain by grain, they'll eventually succumb to wind, rain and time. (A spectacular, witnessed collapse occurred in 1993.) More than 2,000 arches, with wonderful names like Tapestry and Eye of the Whale, were formed from these fins. Delicate Arch is the world's most famous, and the most photographed.

We returned to the desert to hike to the hidden-away Sand Dune Arch. A faded signpost indicated the right direction.

A mile later we slipped into a huge, narrow slit between orange fin-walls rising nearly 100 feet straight up. Probing sunbeams penetrated every seam and crack, slowly, slowly displacing night-gray on their wind-smoothed surfaces. My eyes filled with tears as we dune-walked through the passage, from golden shadow into soaring, wild beauty. There, on the right, was the arch, surrounded by, yet sprung from, these ancient walls. Two enormous sandstone boulders, calved from the mother-wall, lay scattered about. A solitary Utah juniper gleamed silver and green.

Copious golden sand softened the canyon floor, and half-filled its huge, V-shaped crevices.

We stood there, overwhelmed. . That space you just passed represents the answer to my word quest. I smiled, understanding at last.

Sometimes, there are no words.

Dee Blair's Sunnybank Gardens are closed for the season. Her new book, "The View from Sunnybank," a collection of her columns, is available at Horizon Books, Amazon.com and at www.deeblair.com.

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