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| Bowtie is a pothole arch, and also a nice quiet place to sit and write for a while if you want to avoid the masses at the national parks |
An arch, technically, yes. But an arch with its back to the mountain, into which water has trickled for millennia, opening up a wide mouth. I'm sitting beneath a hole in the sandstone ceiling, gazing up at a blue sky.
The clouds scud by quickly overhead. Big, fluffy cumulus for now, but their rate of passage forebodes the kind of swiftly-changing weather you have to expect here in the summer. Afternoon thundershowers.
For now, it's warm and pleasantly dry, with a nice breeze cooling the patch of sweat my backpack has left behind. On my quick jaunt over the layers of slickrock and mudstone I passed wildflowers, purple, yellow, tiny delicate red cups; sweet-smelling juniper and, up here on the higher strata, ponderosa pine. Some of it small and brushy but a few are the nice, conical shape you'd pay eighty bucks for at Christmas.
A lizard approaches me cautiously, his dry belly making tik-tik noises on the pebbles. He's made for this desert: gray-brown at his head and tail, but his midsection is a rust red. Perfectly camouflaged.
I move away from the arch. Who wouldn't be nervous with all those tons of stone balanced so precariously overhead? They could all come crashing down in an instant. Any century now.
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| Bowtie & Corona Arches |
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