Tourist Jim Lin and his wife, Dafang, stopped to snap
a picture of the 306-foot-long Landscape Arch at Utah’s Arches
National Park June 5, when they were startled by a loud cracking
noise. “It was a very big sound, like a dynamite explosion,” Lin
said. What they heard was a 44-foot slab tearing away from the
thinnest section of the arch just before it crashed to the ground.
Since then, two smaller rockfalls were witnessed at the arch, one
June 13, the other June 21. Park superintendent Noel Poe said it’s
impossible to predict how long Landscape Arch will continue
standing. “It’s a natural process we don’t fully understand,” he
said. “It could fall down tomorrow or it could remain a couple
hundred years.” The largest known rockfall from Landscape Arch
occurred in June 1991 when a slab 63 feet long and four feet thick
broke off the bottom. The park currently includes 2,000 natural
arches, and 42 have collapsed over the last 20 years or
so.
* Diane
Kelly
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Falling arches.
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