Arches National Park, Utah

Growing up in Chicago, I had no real frame of reference for what a desert landscape could look like. I had seen pictures, sure, but nothing prepared me for Arches National Park. It felt like I had landed on another planet.

The sheer scale of everything here is hard to wrap your head around. The ancient sandstone fins and towers erupt from the earth in every direction, carved by millions of years of wind and water into shapes that feel almost intentional.

I kept stopping the car just to stare. That hole in the rock, a window punched clean through solid stone, is the kind of thing that makes you question your sense of scale. What carved that? How long did it take?

Seeing two arches framed together like this stopped me in my tracks. The park has over 2,000 natural arches, more than anywhere else on Earth.

Walking through a valley flanked by walls of orange and red rock feels like being at the bottom of a canyon carved by giants. It’s humbling in a way I wasn’t expecting.

One of the things that surprised me most was the color. I expected brown. What I got was a whole spectrum of burnt orange, deep red, pale cream, and dusty purple in the shadows. Utah is warm and ancient.

That boulder has been balanced on top of that spire for thousands of years, and somehow it looks like it could tip over any second. It’s geology doing something that looks flat-out impossible.

Spotting tiny people near the base of those formations finally gave me the scale I needed. Those are enormous towers of stone, and the people are ants.

I kept thinking the landscape looked like a movie set. There’s something about the strange, spire-like formations that feels completely alien.

Arches National Park is one of those places that genuinely changes how you see the world. As a Chicagoan, I wasn’t prepared for a landscape this dramatic, this strange, and this beautiful. If you ever get the chance, go. It will be unlike anything you’ve seen before.