I took a sentimental trip to
Arches National Park a few weeks ago. I haven’t worked as a ranger
at Arches outside Moab, Utah, for 20 years, but I still remember it
fondly and sometimes visit my favorite places. Perhaps the most
dramatic change is the Delicate Arch road. It was always something
of a small miracle to me that the three-mile road was allowed to
remain primitive for as long as it did. Until the mid-1990s, this
gateway to the most-photographed natural arch in the world could
only be accessed by a washboard road that had to be closed every
time it rained. I thought it was great.
What price was a
visitor willing to pay to see Delicate Arch? Was he willing to
subject himself and his car to a teeth-rattling road? The answer
was usually: Not really. At the turnoff to Delicate Arch, the park
had for years maintained a counter near the intersection with the
main road. But Jerry Epperson, the chief ranger at the time,
suspected the numbers being reported were much too high. So we
moved the counter a mile down the road, and suddenly, “visitation”
to Delicate Arch dropped by half. What we discovered was that
drivers were taking one look at that treacherous washboard and
turning around.
Yet some of the visitors’ most memorable
experiences occurred on that old road. When it rained hard, Salt
Valley Wash, between the Delicate Arch trailhead and the main road,
would flood, stranding hikers and their cars on the other side.
It was my job to warn visitors of the possibility of
flash floods when the threat was there, and to assist them when the
warning came too late. In the desert, thunderstorms live up to
their name. While it’s sunny and calm below, it can be raining
torrents upstream. I’d sometimes be able to see the flood building
in every rivulet and side drainage, but I’d be hard pressed to
convince anyone at the trailhead that a wall of milk chocolate was
on the way. After doing my best to spread the word, I’d drive back
across the wash to the safe side and wait.
I could
usually hear the oncoming flood before I saw it. The head of a
flash flood doesn’t roar, it hisses. Before the water comes the
foam, a thick brown smoothie that inches down the waterway at a
pace that always seems so much slower than the wall of water that’s
directly behind it. I’ve walked out into the middle of a dry wash
and waited for the foam. And when it arrived, I managed to stay
just inches ahead of it while walking at a leisurely pace. It
always felt like I was being followed by The Blob.
When
the non-believers finally decided to make their departure, and
drove 200 yards to the Salt Valley Wash crossing, I always liked to
be there waiting for them. I may have had an all-knowing smirk on
my face.
But while the flood sometimes meant they missed
their dinner reservations, or threw them off their itinerary, I
never saw anything but smiles and sheer wonder on the faces of the
stranded tourists. How many people can say they were stranded on a
dirt road in the desert by a flood that arrived while the sun was
shining? Some of the best “campfire talks” ever given at Arches
were shouted across Salt Valley Wash to an amazed, albeit captive
audience.
It usually took a couple of hours for the water
to subside and another hour for the wash bottom to become firm
enough to support the weight of a vehicle. Then, in 1983, the Park
Service road crew spent a day doing bulldozer practice in the wash
and altered its gradient. When they were done, water had to flow
uphill at the wash crossing. When the next flash flood came along,
the water pooled, instead of flowing downstream, and the crossing
became a frequent quagmire after that. A few years later, the park
got the funding to build bridges and pave the road. By 1995, the
project was complete.
Visitors will never know what they
missed. Even so, it’s nice to know that Nature can still have her
way once in a while. In early October, unprecedented rains washed
out the paved road to Delicate Arch and once again gave visitors
something they didn’t expect…the unexpected.
Jim Stiles is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is
the publisher of the Canyon Country Zephyr in
Moab, Utah.
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