Speaking of tongues. By the time we got back from Delicate Arch, it was past noon and very hot. Fortunately, we'd had the foresight to buy a flat of pint water bottles back at the King Soopers in Moab, which we'd left stuffed underneath the vehicle while we were hiking (since we had no other way to keep it cool). While gulping down water, we debated where to eat lunch. We didn't eat it anywhere near this picture, which is of the Windows section of the park, as seen from the Delicate Arch trail parking lot. The arch visible in the picture is, I think, North Window Arch.

We travelled on, past the Fiery Furnace (quite fiery at this time of day), past Sand Dune Arch and Skyline Arch, and were lucky to find a place to park at a picnic ground near the end of the road. In addition to the heat, the wind had picked up quite a bit, and so we tried to find shelter from both. The picnic ground was located between immense vertical fins of Entrada sandstone, which helped to block the wind, but also caught the sun's heat and reflected it back to the ground, making things even hotter; but we were canny enough to stake out a picnic table located in the shade of a large, though not particularly enthusiastic, juniper tree.

The picnic ground was crowded. Most of the people there appeared to have come off of a large unmarked white tour bus, and all were speaking Italian.

(Parenthetical note that shall become the remainder of this post: A striking thing on this trip was the shifting proportions in cultural and ethnic affiliation among park visitors at the various parks and monuments we visited. In southern Utah, it seemed – no actual data were collected, or anything – that most visitors to the park were speaking Spanish, French or Italian. In fact, we wondered a few times if it wasn't the same group of French and Italian tourists following roughly our same route. Either way, people speaking American-accented English were a distinct minority in Bryce, and maybe about 50% of the population in Canyonlands and Arches. I suspect Zion and Bryce get more of the tourist trade by virtue of being about a day's drive from Las Vegas. A lot of the RV's we saw in Utah – and we saw lots of RV's – were rental RV's with California plates. We assumed that tourists fly to Los Angeles or Las Vegas, pick up their RV, and lumber off to Utah with them.
The relatively large numbers of French-speakers surprised me; if anything, my prior experiences in national parks had me braced for yet another lecture from some backpack-toting German about how Americans didn't properly appreciate the National Park System (true enough, I'll grant). The proportions of the various (presumptive) nationalities changed as we headed from one park to another. In Sequoia, there were more 'murkins, maybe 60% or so, and most of the apparent foreigners were speaking Chinese (quite loudly, I might add). In Yosemite, German accents finally showed up, as well as British and 'Strine – the proportion of foreign accents crept upwards of 50% again. When we moved inland, the proportions of presumptive foreigners dropped - to maybe 25% (Chinese and German) in Grand Teton, and 40% or so in Yellowstone. When we moved deeply inland, to Little Bighorn and Badlands, I didn't notice any non-North American accents at all.)

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Hmmm, that's not that interesting a picture, is it? I'll throw in another one. This one's a big rock, fallen off the underside of Double Arch (coming up in a bit).

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Posted by David Fleck at 10 October 2006 08:58 PM