Wait! Before you go moving this to "Health & Safety," it's not those kind of fallen arches.

For anybody who has hiked the Devil's Garden trail in Arches NP, did you know that the Wall Arch collapsed a couple of weeks ago? It's news to me.

We'd gone there last October and I got a "before" shot, actually two, of Wall Arch before its demise.

Apparently it collapsed while no one was around, making me wonder if it ever really happened. But you'd think SOMEBODY would have felt the ground shake.

Thank goodness there's 2,000 arches left in ANP and more being formed daily, although I wouldn't hang around to see where. And they're lucky in Utah that they hadn't picked the image of Wall Arch for their license plates, turnpike tokens and the like, as they did with a stone feature in New Hampshire, or now they'd be scrambling when something as iconic (a rock icon, if you will) as "The Old Man on the Mountain," loses face. (That cliff face did have a slight resemblence to Van Morrison -- in his younger days at least. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />)

So thankfully the people in Utah don't have to get caught up in a debate over whether to replace the symbol of their state with a fiberglass reproduction of something as big as this arch.

This event does make me reconsider standing under these ever-eroding things (that's my wife, Debbie, below Morning Glory Bridge, under my direction. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />) One must remember that by their very nature they are destined to fall. Think I'll be giving them a little wider berth when hiking in Utah in the future, and only in this context can I ever describe myself as becoming an "arch-conservative."