VANISHING SOLITUDE Arches National Park
IMAGINE EDWARD ABBEY’S RESPONSE TO TODAY’S CONJESTED NATIONAL PARKS BY JOHN RASMUSON
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dward Abbey was hired as a seasonal park ranger campgrounds and the fact that most of them have never even at Arches National Monument in 1956. He was 29. heard of Arches National Monument.” Part of his job was to man the entry station. It stood But as every sandstone arch attests, change is as inevitable as alongside a dirt road 20 miles north it is consequential: Pave a road and they of Moab, which was “the uranium will come. The first nine miles of asphalt capital of the world” at the time. On were laid at Arches in 1957. A visitor center most days, no visitors showed up. By with running water opened in 1969, a year the end of the year, just 28,500 people after the publication of Desert Solitaire. By had navigated rough roads for a look at the time Arches became a national park some of the 2,000 redrock arches they in 1971, more than 200,000 people a year had heard about. were making the long drive to check it out. —PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY “Motorized tourists stay away by The park’s 18-mile loop road was resur“OZYMANDIAS” the millions,” Abbey wrote in Desert faced in 2017, a boon to the motorized tourSolitaire, his classic memoir of the two ists who preferred to see the park’s treasummers he worked at Arches. “They stay away because of sures through the windshield. the unpaved entry road, the unflushable toilets in the three Visitors to the park reached the 1 million mark in 2010. Nine
22 | Vamoose Utah • April 2020
“LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR!”
