Arches Half Day - Safari Arches 4x4 Tour

What your day looks like

Visit Arches National Park and discover iconic landforms of contrasting colors and textures unlike any other in the world. This red-rock wonderland will amaze you with its formations, refresh you with its trails, and inspire you with its dynamics of erosion. Even on this day of spiraling visitation, our tour leads you into the solitude of Arches that few get to experience. Our 4x4 trail begins near Doc Williams Point, our family pedigree. The trail climbs a steep, but short rock wall, cuts across a valley, and meanders through sandstone fins and dunes. En-route we pass the Marching Men, Tower Arch, and the Eye of the Whale. We exit via an old cowboy trail and see Dinosaur tracks on our way back to Moab. Roughly 65 million years ago, Arches was a dry seabed and massive desert full of shifting sand dunes. The rock layers visible in the park today were once buried by over a mile of other rock that had to erode first to expose what we see today. Beneath the surface a thick layer of salts, squeezed by tons of rock above it, flowed and bulged upward, creating long domes. The sandstone layers covering these domes were forced to crack. Water seeped into these fractures breaking off chunks of sandstone. This process turned fractured rock layers into fins or a series of parallel lines. Rainwater soaked into the porous sandstone slowly dissolving the calcite bonding the sand. This trapped water expanded and contracted during freeze-thaw cycles eroding the fins into arches. The fact that so many arches still stand, tells us this area has been rather geologically stable for at least 50,000 years.