Back in 1967, when Edward Abbey wrote Desert Solitaire, he said:  "This is the most beautiful place on earth."  At the time, he was working for  $1.95 per hour as a seasonal ranger in what was then called Arches National Monument.  Who am I to disagree with that impressive sentiment?  Abbey roamed around the slickrock desert, taking it all in, allowing the sand critters and the sandstone monoliths to engage his senses, not hesitant to grovel in the gritty earth if that is what it took to come to grips with his pure, hallucinatory surroundings. 
He kept a journal, the rough pages of which became his most famous work.  But Abbey knew full well that trying to describe in words what he was experiencing in Arches was beyond his, or anyone's, ability.  He tried to evoke a world, not describe it.  He said:  "Language makes a mightly loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite."  I thought about that this past Sunday as I walked through the Devils Garden section of the park, stopping often just to gaze, constantly having to resist the urge to take yet another photograph of yet another gnarled, aged, beautiful juniper tree.  The significance of a place such as this, said Abbey, is in its power "to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful."  And I was so aware that there were moments when, had I let myself go, I could easily have burst into tears.
But wherever I might wander in Arches, squeezing through the narrow red fins and rock formations in the maze called Fiery Furnace, or watching the marvel of the sun setting behind Delicate Arch with the La Sal mountains off in the distance about twenty miles away, I always return to the center of the park, the godhead watching over the immensity of the land, the Balanced Rock.
One has to drive about nine miles past the visitor center, well into the park, to get to this 128' tall wonder.  Edward Abbey lived in a trailer in this area back before the road into the park was paved, before it was even officially a "Park."  One evening he encountered some land surveyors who told him they were measuring out the way to pave the road through Abbey's wonderland.  The vision of all the tourists arriving in their cars, smelling of cheap motel soap, ill-equipped (in Abbey's mind) to appreciate his desert world, was too much for him.  Once the road engineers drove off, Abbey followed their course back toward headquarters, walking for miles, pulling up each and every survey stake and tossing them away, hiding the bright ribbons under rocks, knowing all the while it was a futile effort, but "it made me feel good."