Arch Rock Trail

Author's Comments

There is a moment, maybe twenty minutes before sunset in late November, when the granite at White Tank goes the color of a struck match. The arch itself is modest by national park standards. It is not Delicate, it is not Mesa, it is not the kind of formation that gets put on a license plate. But what it offers is a frame, and a frame in the desert is a rare and useful thing. I shoot it two ways. The first is the obvious one, kneeling low on the south side and letting the arch hold a piece of sky, sometimes a moon if the timing is right, sometimes just the deepening blue of the hour after golden. A wide lens earns its keep here. The second is harder and I do not always get it. You climb a little to the east, find a higher boulder, and wait for the last light to rake across the granite from the side. The arch becomes secondary then. The whole field of stone goes amber and the shadows between the boulders turn almost violet, and the picture is no longer about the arch at all but about the particular alchemy of low sun on coarse rock. The trail is short enough that you can do it twice in an evening, which I recommend. Walk it once in daylight to see the shapes. Walk it again as the light drops. Spring works too, especially after a wet winter when the brittlebush is going yellow at the base of the boulders, but I keep coming back in late fall when the air is dry and the horizon stays clean all the way to sundown.

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