“There have been some, even in
the Park Service, who advocate spraying Delicate Arch with a
fixative of some sort — Elmer’s glue perhaps or Lady Clairol
Spray Net.” Believe it or not, that’s what Edward Abbey wrote
in Desert Solitaire, and when I first read that,
I thought he was kidding.
The idea of spraying a fixative
on the sandstone icon of Arches National Park in the Utah desert
was too ridiculous to be taken seriously. This, of course, was
before my decade of employment with the federal government.
During my first winter as a ranger at Arches, when the
tourists were few and far between, I spent much of my day rummaging
through file cabinets. One day, a folder caught my eye because its
label read: “Delicate Arch Stabilization Project.” I couldn’t
believe my eyes.
What I found inside was a decade’s worth
of memos, letters and reports, all dedicated to the question:
Should the Park Service save Delicate Arch from imminent collapse?
The issue was first raised by custodian Russ Mahan in 1947, in a
memo to the regional director.
On a recent hike, Mahan
said, he’d noticed “the eroded condition of the east leg of
Delicate Arch … If we lost this arch we would be losing one of
the most important features of Arches National Monument.”
Mahan seemed convinced that the collapse of Delicate Arch might
take away any incentive to visit the place at all. The letter got
the ball rolling, but just barely. Mahan’s concerns went to
Washington. “There was,” he added, “the possibility that (the)
condition of the formation may endanger visitors there.” But the
threat of an arch squashing innocent tourists was still not enough
to elicit much interest.
Eighteen months later, interest
was rekindled when Southwest Regional Assistant Director Hugh
Miller visited the arch: “I have decided to join, as a result of
this trip, those who believe that stabilization of Delicate Arch is
warranted.” But then came the Park Service’s landscape
architect, David Van Pelt, who was the first to see that meddling
with Mother Nature might backfire. “It should be realized,” Van
Pelt wrote, “that the wisdom and success of whatever action may or
may not be taken to stabilize the arch can never be accurately
appraised.”
Van Pelt proposed doing nothing, on the
grounds that “more harm than benefit may be done,” or barring that,
to spray “the weak leg with a silicone epoxy.” That was enough for
agency higher-ups in Globe, Ariz. They contacted silicone
manufacturers all over the country.
Meanwhile, the staff
at Arches appeared to be hiding from the entire project. Arches
Superintendent Bates Wilson’s signature, for example, is
conspicuously absent from all correspondence during the 1950s. Yet
memos flowed asking Bates for details about the kind of silicone
he’d bought, and if more money were needed to complete the
job on Delicate Arch’s bum leg. Bates kept mum. In 1954, the
acting general superintendent sent Bates one more memo. “Will you
please,” he pleaded, “make a special report on this project at your
very earliest convenience?”
Bates apparently continued to
stonewall, and the subject died. Then in 1956, a visitor to Arches
wrote to the Park Service director and started the ball rolling
again by warning that if Delicate Arch weren’t stabilized,
“millions yet unborn” might not see the arch. Incredibly, the
tourist suggested “that a clear, erosion- resistant material could
be sprayed on.” An acting regional director said the agency was on
top of the problem, though later in 1956, the tourist was told that
“more years of experimentation were needed.”
With that,
the idea finally collapsed. Bates Wilson, in particular, simply
outlasted the bureaucrats. No one loved Delicate Arch more than
Wilson, but the idea of using an orchard sprayer to seal it with
silicone never appealed to his common sense. He continued to worry
about Delicate Arch, but not from the standpoint of its collapse.
In a report filed not long after the worried-visitor
letter, Bates wrote that “the increasing desire of fools to carve
their names in public places has reached the highest level possible
in Arches at Delicate Arch.”
Fifty years later, the wind
and the rain continue to sculpt the arch, picking away at it grain
by grain. Idiots with big egos and no brains still come to the arch
to scratch their names on it, but yes, the arch is still standing.
Jim Stiles is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
He is the publisher of the Canyon Country Zephr
in Moab, Utah.
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