Evening: Arches in the (Really) Dark

My footsteps are echoing too loudly, too alone, in the dark corridors of the canyon. My tiny headlamp is too feeble to light the way at my feet. The trail is too uneven to tread with any confidence or speed. And my gut is giving me that subtle, unsettling sensation that tells me this slight uphill to the right isn’t the way I originally came.

I pinch my key-fob light on and sweep its bluish beam wide, searching for a friendly cairn in an unfriendly darkness. There is none.

Twenty minutes ago, two knots of people had left the Delicate Arch ahead of me, wielding bright flashlights against the waning twilight. I am kicking myself for not asking to join them. For hanging around after sundown in hopes of seeing the stars tonight from the arch. For planning to depend solely on the two lights I had packed for the purpose—a tiny LED reading lamp clipped to my visor, and an LED key fob that helps me find keyholes in the dark.

It is past 10pm. I’m more than a mile from my truck in a very empty Arches National Park. Walking a completely unfamiliar canyon. In total darkness. Alone. And I’ve just taken another wrong turn.

Delicate Arch is one of those “have to” formations to see at Arches National Park. I had therefore stayed away from it for two days, fully intending to leave it unvisited. I want no “shoulds” in my travels, and if I miss the experiences that others label grand, then so be it. I make my own grand adventures.

Like this one. Lost. At night. On a hunk of rock that offers many more ways to mistake a trail than to stay on the one that will lead me home.

I’m actually glad I came to Delicate Arch this evening. Arches NP is open 24 hours a day, although staffed only during regular business hours. Yesterday, I had decided to spend my last evening in Moab in the park for the sunset, and to stay long enough to see the stars come out over the desert. Driving up an hour before dusk, I mulled over the choices of venue at the park. The Windows? Park Avenue? Balance Rock? Petrified Dunes? Any old pullout that looked promising?

No. The famed Delicate Arch it would be. It just felt right.

I had made it to the arch in time for the sunset—barely. It is a very hot, very uphill, 1.5 mile hike from the arch’s parking lot, a lot of it on steep rock fins and across small washes, then along a wide ledge or two to the final stop. The only markers are small cairns at the trickiest bit of the trail, and a couple of signs directing you away from non-trail spots.




The last corner I turn on the ledge pulls me up short—there it is, in all its balanced strength. Free-standing. More upright than wide. Dominating the southeast-ish edge of a wide and deep canyon bowl. And people are everywhere. They line the encircling edge with cameras. They horse around inside the arch for photos. They spill down into the upper parts of the basin to appreciate the arch.

It’s 8:51pm. And all these people watch the arch. Expectantly. As if the stone is going to burst into colorful flame as the sun sighs into the west. It doesn’t, for a high hunk of rock blocks the arch from the actual horizon light. But it’s still quite beautiful to watch in the changing and fading glow.

I sit down against the rock. My back and bum and the back of my legs are warm from the stone. The temperature is easily 90 something; I’ve been in the desert long enough that I barely notice it now.

It’s quiet here. The soft murmur of voices, boots clomping by, the occasional shout across the basin for a family member. The whine of a mosquito. Many accents and languages surround me...Korean, German, French, Japanese, British. A young Frenchman sees me trying to take a self-portrait and steps in to help. He did I pretty good job, I think.


Two teenage girls charge into the basin, stop where I’m parked. “Are you staying here a while? Will you take our picture?”

They rush to the archway to pose, I get a few shots, and they dash away to take one last photo somewhere else back on the trail. They’re both dressed in black shorts and dark tops. They are barely visible in the photo, the arch is so large and the light is so poor now.

Little by little the crowds disperse with their kids and cameras and gear. A couple of guys are here for the long haul, too. They’ve set up a tripod and camera for star shoots. They have agreed to let me tag along when they leave, but they don’t know when that will be. There’s cloud cover above us right now. One of them says there’s a half moon tonight, enough light to go back on the trail. The opposite turns out to be true—we are on the tag end of a waning moon, and what’s there is supposed to rise very late.

The last two groups of people leave ahead of me with their flashlights on. Only I and the two photographers are left. The flashlight beams flicker and disappear down the rock ledge. Twilight is hanging low, and I’m beginning to feel nervous about running out of daylight too soon.

To heck with the stars. I’m leaving. I say goodbye and thanks to the guys, activate my itty bitty clip-on light, and begin the hike back. Total darkness comes too quickly. Only my key-fob LED is strong enough to show me cairns across bare rock and through rocky washes. Every step is uneven, and I move slowly so I don’t pitch headlong off a ledge or face-plant into a rock. I lose my way a few times, but manage to find it again quickly enough.

Until now. No manner of 360-degree turning reveals anything familiar about how I had gotten either to Delicate Arch or to where I’m now standing. “OK, angels,” I mutter. “I could really use some help here.” I double back on what I hope is the way I’ve just come.

Moments later, I am on what seems to be a switchback, and I see a flashlight searching in the near distance. Several people are milling around the light, not going anywhere.

“Hello!” I yell. “Are you on trail?”

“We’re not sure!” The voice is mid-20s male, the accent thickly Asian.

Actually, I don’t really care if they’re on trail. They have a flashlight that seems better than mine, and there are four of them. I’m no longer alone. “Stay there! How do I get to you?” My little beam is eagerly scanning the surrounding scrub and rock for good footing.

“Go over there. No, to your left. Your left. This way, I think.”

I stumble around trying to follow their flashlight and am so glad to reach them I could hug one of them. England's Coast to Coast walk taught me that it’s always safer (and more fun) to get lost with others than by myself.

“Do you know where to go?” the young man asks hopefully. “How to get back?” He is pointing aimlessly with the light, and the other three cluster close. They are all 20-somethings, wearing light jackets and shorts, no packs. They have only the one flashlight among them, a dual-bulb hand-crank unit about the size of a fist. It sounds like beans shaken in a box as he generates more juice to keep the bulbs alive.

I am skipping my own brighter beam across the terrain, trying to stay and sound calm. “Look for a cairn.” They have no idea what I’m talking about. “A small pile of stones. They mark the trail.”

They all murmur and shuffle, not willing to go anywhere, but not sure what to do to help either. My bobbing light finally reveals a marker to the right, and I breathe relief. “There’s one! This way.”

We go by fits and starts along a path of widely spaced cairns. To conserve the battery, I am turning my LED on only to check the path, and otherwise peering into the inky dark by the pale light of my headlamp. Behind me, I sense the others are hanging back a little, listening for my callouts—“OK, here’s another, we’re still on track!”—and not doing a lot to help find the trail themselves. Then it dawns me that they are huddling around their one flashlight to guide their footing, and that in my eagerness to be out of the canyon, I’m moving faster than they can.

OK, time to close ranks. And, doh, I have more lights with me. I stop us all to distribute the camping lights that I had grabbed before I left the RV park. They’re meant for tent ropes so you don’t trip on them in the dark, but I’ve used them on night walks so traffic can see me.

I clip one to my backpack for them to follow, and hand out the other three to those without lights. My intention is to help us keep track of each other, but the others are so grateful just to have their own light that I realize they are more than a little worried over our trek. The tiny amber and red clip-ons glow comfortingly from the front of their shirts.

My miraculous wee lights and apparent confidence seem to qualify me as a trail-blazing ranger, and from then on, I’m the unofficial leader. I slow the pace and pause often to alert the others to obstructions on the trail, lighting each hazard until all are clear of it.

I offer introductions to ease the tension. They are Kevin, Justine, Lucinda, and Chung-Liung, all from California (originally Hong Kong). They are traveling for three weeks on a whirlwind loop that has taken them all the way to Seattle (they loved the Underground Tour and hearing about Galloping Gertie, the collapsing bridge in Tacoma Narrows), and into Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and who knows where all else. Kevin chats while we continue on, and he is the only one who does much talking to me. He speaks with the others in Chinese.

Honestly, though, I’m not paying much attention. The path continues to be too uncertain for my nerves, and our route is a stop-and-go affair with me fanning my light every other second to triple-check we’re on track.

Each time we get stuck, I feel for the trail. “Look, here’s well-worn rock. This is the way.” Or, shining the beam into a sandy wash, “Here are lots of footprints. Let’s try here.” Or, “No, this can’t be right. We’re about to walk on crust. We’ve missed somewhere.”

“You know a lot about finding the trail,” says Kevin.

“Naw, observant, mostly,” I say. But he’s right. I’ve had two days of hiking the canyons and experiencing to footing and feel. I’ve absorbed more than I thought about what makes a popular trail work.

I am smiling to myself. Half an hour ago, I was lost and anxious and so thrilled to find other people I thought I could tag along with, and now I’m the one leading the chicks home.

A bit later we come upon a group of Germans, the same trio who had left the arch just ahead of the rest of us. They are all wearing headlamps and have stalled on the trail, stuck about which way to go.

“Straight ahead,” I say, although no cairns are around. “I recognize this fin we’re on. We all went up it to get to the arch.”

They turn and forge ahead with great confidence. I had expected them to stay with us as a loose band (it, is after all, pretty stupid to split up again), but they soon out-distance us. I later wish I had asked them to hang back—my little group loses the track again over bare rock and we could have used their headlamps.

Facing a dead-end of crust at my feet, a gully to the left, and uphill rock to my right, I’m stymied about the way, but my friends set up a chorus in Chinese-accent English. “They went that way. Down there. I saw their lights. That way. Down to the left.”

Thank goodness they had paid attention when I had not.

“OK,” I say, expecting them to turn us all around, “lead on that way.”

But instead they stand aside on the narrow trail and invite me again to the front, and we quickly right ourselves on the path they had found.

At last my feet crunch on rough sand and gravel. “Hurrah!” I yelp. “We’re made it to the easy part.” Everyone whoops. We’re about a quarter mile from our cars.

My trail anxieties gone, I finally pause to look up instead of down. Stars. Thousands of them spackling a black and moonless sky. The others stop with me, and we admire and exclaim over the Milky Way, which some of them have never seen. We point out the constellations we know, guess at those we don’t, and wonder over how big and small everything really is in the universe. The combination of stargazing and our safe return to the trail makes the others more talkative, and we are all laughing and chatting and thanking each other when we finally arrive at the last turn into the parking lot.

Behind us, one more pair of eerie blue lights comes bouncing down the trail—the two photographers from the arch. They’d left 15 minutes after I did, and made their way down by the light of their cell phones.

It’s taken us about an hour to go a mile and a half in the dark on a hike that none of us probably should have been doing, at least not so ill-prepared. But as usual, help showed up when I needed it, I made some new friends, and we had some good laughs. And I still saw the desert stars. Great evening.