Utah's Landmark

Brad Butler surveyed the scene: azure sky, the winter-white LaSal Mountains prominent to the southeast and peerless Delicate Arch defying gravity on a lip of rock beyond a deep sandstone bowl.

"Looks like spring today," he said, though it wasn't quite. "It's been pretty exceptional, just with the lack of haze between here and the LaSals."Butler, a professional photographer from Grand Junction, Colo., had been setting up tripod and camera at various spots to capture a sequence of late-afternoon images of the world-famous arch. The inverted stone horseshoe has been featured often on atlas and coffee-table book covers and has symbolically advertised the state's wonders on Utah license plates and - as a giant inflated balloon - at the Nagano Olympics.

With his young friend Dylan, Butler had been waiting patiently for late-winter twilight in a venue he'd found rewarding in the past at sunset.

"Last time there was snow around the base of the arch," he said. "We had a red sky and there were little puddles of water down there in the bowl," a natural amphitheater eroded into the bluff upon which Delicate Arch perches so miraculously. The mirrorlike pools resulted in unusual and beautiful images, Butler said.

Delicate Arch is a worthy goal at most any time of day and at most any time of year, but many hikers and photographers find the angled, tinted light of sunset and the background provided by the white-capped winter- and springtime LaSals to be the best of all.

The arch - a fantastic span 45 feet tall, supported by two remarkable legs - is visible in miniature from the park's main highway, as well as across a gorge from the not-quite-so-distant Cache Valley viewpoint. But the only way to get a close-up look is to march from the Salt Creek trailhead up a 1.5-mile trail (3 miles roundtrip).

The trek, a mildly strenuous one, is described this way in the Park Service's Arches pamphlet:

"Elevation gain of 480 feet/146 meters; no shade - take at least one quart of water per person! Open slickrock with some exposure to heights."

And, the brochure adds: "Best at sunset."

At peak season, the trail and the arch itself are beset with tourists, as is the park in general. In spring and summer, "it's virtually impossible to photograph the Delicate Arch . . . without someone standing in it," an English tourist observed in a diary posted on the Internet.