According to my now dog-eared guide book, the round-trip hike to Delicate Arch would be a moderately strenuous three-mile trek. I, for one, wasn’t going to complain. After being constrained to the passenger’s seat of our rental for several hours, I was ready to reawaken the muscles in my legs and back. But, standing outside the car near the trailhead and watching a pathway slither up slick slabs of stone into the distance, I sensed an all-too-familiar feeling of dread flooding my chest and worried that yet another leisurely hike I had selected might turn out to be an arduous climb.
With a week of National Parks under my belt, I had solid proof that Heather and I had two dangerous tendencies. To begin with, when we picked out hikes, we would virtually disregard the level of difficulty, as long as they were less than ten miles or so and didn’t require technical skills. We didn’t fly across the country just to visit a visitor’s center, after all. Then, once we were halfway down a trail and faced with an obstacle not exactly suitable for novice hikers, such as a 1500-foot elevation gain or a river, we would plunge ahead with reckless determination, FOMO nipping at our heels. Exhaustion, dehydration, and other reminders of our mortality inevitably ensued. As we locked the car and gained the trailhead to Delicate Arch, I chose to be hopeful and told myself this time would be different. A hike to one of the most iconic landmarks in the West surely wouldn’t be that difficult, I inwardly pleaded.
About halfway up, we lost the trail. The hike actually hadn’t been physically demanding up to that point, but while I had been encouraged in that regard, I was dismayed in another. During our travels, I had learned that the park service has a cardinal rule against littering the pristine landscapes of the American West with unnecessary signs shouting trivialities like “Delicate Arch This Way.” Instead, they use more creative means to help visitors intuit where they should be going, such as the tactfully-placed stacks of rocks at Arches which encourage hikers not to walk over a cliff. Unfortunately, these natural markers have their limits. We had tried our best always to keep the knee-high towers to our right—I assumed they were supposed to be on our right—thinking our objective wouldn’t be too hard to find if we kept them close by. But, without warning, we had been deposited into the middle of an empty stone expanse without any little piles of rocks to offer helpful hints as to the whereabouts of our destination.
After a few minutes analyzing the situation, I stood dumbly. We seemed to be making no progress locating the trail or the rock span in question. Delicate Arch was supposed to be quite large, or it seemed relatively large on Utah license plates anyway, but looking around, I could see no sign of it. Now, with the sun on the verge of setting and no one else in sight, I wasn’t sure if it was wise to continue guessing where we were headed. Clearly, the park service had studied up on Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense-building techniques and implemented them in their trail design.
Just as our story was reaching its crisis, however, Heather caught a glimpse of some hikers disappearing around an outcropping a hundred feet or so to our right; with no other leads to go on, we hurried after the auspicious posse. At least we wouldn’t be alone if we ended up getting lost in a remote corner of the Utahn desert after dark. The throng of hikers pursued a narrow path which hugged a rock wall, so close to an eye-popping drop-off that all hope drained out of me and I was convinced we had now completely lost our bearings and were past the point of no return.
As I frantically weighed our options, the trail ushered us into a natural amphitheater. Wind seemed to have smoothed the land in front of us into a grand half-circle inscribed with the flowing lines of a Japanese rock garden, and the elusive, famed arch that had almost driven us to exasperation materialized on the other side, illuminated in the golden light of the descending sun. My rambling thoughts on survival strategy evaporated as I finally stood in the presence of Delicate Arch.
I was struck both by its immensity and fragility. The fifty-foot-tall span dwarfed the hikers milling underneath its sand- and dust-colored layers, but its size only amplified how unstable it seemed. Countless cracks and cuts in the sandstone made Delicate Arch look like the wrinkled fingers of lifelong potter or carpenter, and erosive forces had girdled one leg so severely I wondered how safe the structure really was. And yet, Delicate Arch struck me as a survivor. While so much of the land had worn away around it, this curve of rock had remained on its perch overlooking the surrounding desert for millennia.
The ephemerality of nature coursed through the chapters of our trip like a moral we had been tasked with learning. Everywhere we visited, we were witnesses to the effects of erosion on an epic scale: the buttes of Monument Valley, the Narrows in Zion, and, of course, the Grand Canyon. And, whether we wanted them to or not, these processes continued. In Bryce Canyon, a ranger said that it was only a matter of time before Thor’s Hammer, one of the most recognizable hoodoos in the park, inevitably collapsed into the gulley from which it rose. I sighed with the sobering realization that even hallowed landmarks worthy of pilgrimage can’t remain forever. Their only immortality rests in our minds and the memorials we build with words and paint. In the end, Nature will have her way as she creates, destroys and rebuilds in an inscrutable, eternal rhythm.
After traversing the amphitheater to gaze up at the arch from below and feel the grit of its surface on my fingertips, I met Heather on a nearby ridge for the sunset. Turning my back on Delicate Arch and the lengthening shadow it cast over the valley behind us, I watched as the sun’s fiery fingers played on the landscape before us. The rocks and mountains around me glowed with a spectrum of crimson, orange, and taupe, the exact composition constantly fluctuating as the sun breathed over the earth.
They say the Parisian artists known as the Impressionists painted in the open air with quick and imprecise brushstrokes because they wanted to capture a moment in time before it evolved into another moment entirely. As they honed their skills, they learned that each second arrives with its own unique palette and configuration, and then another abruptly takes its place, leaving behind only a shadow of the one before.
In just one day, we would be soaring home miles above this landscape at an incomprehensible speed, and the land I had come to know so intimately over the past week would fade into the twilight. In two days, Heather would be driving to South Carolina to start the final year of her doctoral program in mathematics, and I would be in Virginia cherishing the last few weeks of summer before my studies began at Old Dominion University. New moments would continue to replace the old like a never-ending flipbook rushing forward. But, for now, I basked in the present and savored the moments Heather and I had accumulated over the past week, turning them over again and again in my mind as if I were watching a looping film: the sensation of teetering river stones under my feet, the feel of cool crevices behind cliff dwellings, the scent of raw life beneath a saddle. I held tightly to these moments and defied the shroud of time to take them from me.
Heather and I stayed on the ridge until the sun’s evening performance had finished, and then we walked confidently back down the narrow path and across the plateau to the trail. Chattering clusters of hikers dissolved into bobbing lights floating down the mountain as the sky faded from periwinkle to cobalt.
The Barefooted Soul 