This is the city of Moab in Utah, home to just 5,000 but accommodating large numbers of tourists due to several nearby attractions, one of which was the point of our being here. How's that for a backdrop?! This is what we've been driving through since crossing into Utah yesterday - straight out of the Road Runner cartoons :) Several movies have been filmed in and around Moab for decades, most recently that ridiculous Transformers movie, 127 Hours (about the dude who cut his own arm off after getting trapped in a canyon), and even Austin Powers.

Anyway, our excursion for today was this: Arches National Park!

Arches covers close to 80,000 acres and boasts the world's greatest concentration of natural sandstone arches (over 2,000 at last count, ranging from tiny to huge), as well as a variety of other unique geological formations including balanced rocks, fins, spires, and pinnacles.

Many of the park's features are named for the shapes they resemble, such as The Three Gossips on the left, and Sheep Rock on the right.

This one looks like a giant penis.

We don't all come here to take photos :)

Of the 2,000 or so arches within the park, a handful are particularly famous and easy to access, such as Double Arch here which is the highest in the park at 112 feet (33m) tall. The historical geology of the park that has resulted in this amazing landscape is long and convoluted (refer to the Wikipedia link above). The arches however have a much simpler explanation. Over time (and a lot of it), superficial cracks, joints, and folds of the soft sandstone layers become saturated with rain water. During winter that water freezes, and in turn melts again during summer. This repeating process causes rock particles to wash away and/or be blown away by wind, and eventually the lack of cementing material causes whole chunks of rock to fall away. Some structures end up collapsing completely, whereas others with the right degree of hardness survive despite their missing middles.

The whole park is an amazing environment, and the contrast of colours, landforms and textures make it quite the photographer's paradise!

Our next arch of choice involved a stroll through an area known as Devil's Garden.

I took about a million photos in here - everywhere I turned was a photo opportunity!

As tempting as it is, wandering off trail is strictly forbidden, probably because one too many idiots fell and broke their ass.

This big guy is Landscape Arch - the largest in the park with a span of 306 feet (93m). It looks as though it could collapse at any minute, and in September 1991 it almost did, while a crowd of tourists were under it hehe. After suddenly hearing loud cracking and popping noises, they all got the fuck out of there as small rocks started to fall. Moments later, a huge slab of rock peeled away from the arch's right side (shot on the right). When the dust settled, 180 tons of rock debris lay scattered on the ground there, and nobody has been allowed back in there since for fear the rest of it may go.

Anyway, other points of interest throughout the park include Balanced Rock (really two layers of rock - the lower of which has been severely eroded)...

Fiery Furnace, which is a huge mess of rock and shady canyons that require a guide to enter (otherwise people get lost)...

And Park Avenue, featuring a flat-walled canyon reminiscent of a big city skyline (so I'm guessing it was named after New York's Park Avenue).

Park Avenue. Not exactly New York City, but close enough ;)

After an early start (to get the best light) and a morning full of excitement, we headed back to Moab for lunch, air conditioning, and to stock up on fluids for a harder evening hike.

And here we go - a steep 1.5-mile hike under a beating sun hehe. More amazing vistas though.

Yet another million photos taken, of which only a handful make it up on this website for brevity. Suffice it to say, this place blew me away!

1.5 miles and a very sweaty hour later, we made it to our final stop of the day.

This is Delicate Arch, the most famous in the park (and perhaps the world), an infamous icon of Utah, and it's most photographed location (we've been visiting a few of them lately). The arch can be seen at a distance from a short roadside trail, but where's the fun in that?!

By the way, if it looks as though we had the entire national park to ourselves, we definitely did not hehe. Through camera trickery and Photoshop magic, I get rid of them.

To give a better idea of the size of Delicate Arch, there's little old us standing beneath it on the left. No magic needed here to remove the tourists - I merely asked them to piss off.

Backside of Delicate Arch, with a very steep drop out of shot behind me.

And that's Arches National Park in a nutshell - easily one of my favourite spots so far!

After all the sweating and rock climbing etc., we felt it was finally time to do some laundry. We'd racked up quite a lot hehe.

Back on the road travelling through Utah this morning with it's awesome roadside vistas, although we're actually back in Colorado for the night.

Before leaving Utah however, we made a quick stop at yet another natural sandstone arch.

This one is Wilson Arch, plonked right beside the road with a span of 91 feet (28m) and a height of 46 feet (14m). Lovely.

Shortly after, we crossed back into Colorado, and to our accommodation for the night - a teepee hehe. Saves pitching the tent :)

Then from teepees to cliff dwellings. This is Mesa Verde National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site protecting some of the best preserved Ancestral Puebloan archeological sites in the United States. The Ancestral Puebloan are an ancient Native American culture, also known as the Anasazi.

Although the Anasazi had been around for thousands of years prior, they didn't move into this area until around the year 600 AD, establishing small pit houses (large holes in the ground with a wooden roof overhead) on the cliff tops. As the population grew and matured, they moved from pit houses to adobe houses built above ground. By the end of the 12th century, the Anasazi began to move under overhangs found in the cliffs of the canyons and construct these massive cliff dwellings from sandstone, mortar, and wooden beams. Barely 100 years later however, following a period of social and environmental instability driven by a series of severe and prolonged droughts, they abandoned the area and moved south to locations in current-day Arizona and New Mexico.

The park contains more than 4,000 sites and 600 cliff dwellings. Above is the most of famous of those dwellings and the largest in North America - Cliff Palace.

I wonder whether they ever paused for a minute, looked out over the canyon and thought to themselves, "Hmm, this joint is nice!"

Where we're staying tonight is fairly remote, which means low light pollution and good opportunities for astrophotography. I had a quick play around with the Milky Way tonight and this is what I came up with. Hopefully more to follow!

After flicking back and forth between US states throughout this trip, today we touched four of them at once hehe. This is the Four Corners Monument, marking the point where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet (the only place in the US where four states meet). Surrounding the monument are stalls run by local Native American artisans selling souvenirs. We had to leave Colorado and enter New Mexico to get to the entrance of the monument, and then immediately headed back into Utah. Now we're in Arizona for the night before heading back into Utah yet again tomorrow hehe.

Back in Utah we drove through Monument Valley - an area characterized by clusters of vast sandstone buttes which epitomise the American Southwest. The average high temperature here at this time of year is 100 F (38 C) and it was pretty close to that today, so we didn't stray too far from the air conditioned car for long.

This cliché image of Monument Valley is featured in Forrest Gump, as the point where Gump, after three years of running "for no particular reason", declared "I'm pretty tired. I think I'll go home now."

Kristina Gump, also pretty tired.

Drive Aaron, drive!

Our final stop of the day was Horseshoe Bend in Arizona, where the Colorado River turns 270 degrees around this incredible horseshoe-shaped canyon. I needed to do an oversized panorama for this because it's really the only way to fit it all in.

The river flows from right to left as seen from this overlook, and is accessible for boating and kayaking etc. from nearby Lake Powell. Too bad there's not a cycle path down there.

It's often a challenge for Kristina to coerce herself to pose for certain photos when there is even the slightest hint of danger involved. In this case, that danger was a 1,000-foot (300m) drop straight down to the river hahaha! There's actually another ledge out of shot that we're resting our feet on, so fear not, mothers :)