Long before I set foot inside I had seen photographs of some of the rock formations of Arches National Park, near Moab, Utah. Frankly, I decided that they all had been processed somehow in Photoshop so that they all were this rich, rich reddish-orangish color. How wrong I was! The rocks are this color, particularly right after sunrise during the magic hour. A second surprise I got was that, despite being named Arches National Park because it has the largest concentration of natural arches in the world (2000), there are beautiful rock formations there that are not arches at all. And their shapes have suggested delightful names by those who saw them long, long ago. Here are 3 of these. What gives them their color? Actually, they are rusty. They are a combination of sand and mud that has cemented together two minerals (hematite and limonite.) The first contains oxide, the second iron ore. Where do you find rust? Take a piece of iron and get it wet (H2O), and you produce rust. The process in Utah is, of course, much, much more complex, but thats the basics. To say that Arches National Park is quite a place is an oversimplification...
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 23:27:14 +0000