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Natural stone arches and fantastic rock formations, Sculpted as if by an
artist's hand, are the defining features of this park, and they exist in
remarkable numbers and variety. Just as soon as you've seen the most
beautiful, most colourful, most gigantic stone arch. You can imagine, walk
around the next bend and there's another bigger better and more brilliant
than the last. Just down the road from Canyonlands National Park, Arches is
much more visitor friendly with relatively shor, well maintained trails
leading to most of the park's major attractions. The arches seem more
accessible and less forbidding than the spires and pinnacles at Canyonlands
and other southern Utah Parks, some think of arches as bridges but to
geologists there's a big difference. Bridges are formed when a river slowly
bores through solid rack, while the often bizarre and beautiful contours of
arches result from the erosive force of rain and snow freezing and thawing,
dissolving the "glue" that holds sand grains together and chips away at the
stone, until gravity finally pulls a chunk off. |
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