"This is the most beautiful place on earth."

MOAB — Don't take my word for it. Take Edward Abbey's, who used the above sentence to start his book, "Desert Solitaire," which was published 39 years ago, in 1968, and was based on his employment as a seasonal park ranger at what was then Arches National Monument during a three-year period starting 50 years ago, in 1957.

Those were simpler times — for Arches and for Abbey, who would become perhaps the world's most well-known naturalist/environmentalist/anarchist/curmudgeon before his death in 1989. He never met a tourist he liked.

But in 1957 he was a 30-year-old from Pennsylvania who took one look at sunrise over the "hoodoo stone of Arches" and, following the above lead paragraph, wrote, "For myself, I'll take Moab, Utah. I don't mean the town itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it — the canyonlands. The slickrock desert. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky — all that which lies beyond the end of the roads."

Fast forward to today and you'll find Balanced Rock more or less at the middle of a 40-mile paved road system that attracts nearly a million visitors a year to Arches National Park, the vast majority of them ignoring Abbey's warning that "You can't see anything from a car."

Even as June turns to July, and the thermometer shoots past 100, they flock to Arches.

As the ranger observed when I paid my $5 bicycle entry fee early this past Friday morning in front of a lineup that included a motor home, two motorcycles and seven passenger cars:

"People ask, 'Why's it so hot?' I say, 'because you came to the desert and it's July."'

All of which points to yet another thing that's changed considerably since 1957. Automobile air conditioners.

I could have used a bike air conditioner, to be honest, but there was no way I was coming to Arches to start off the 2007 Bicycle Tour of Utah National Parks without beginning at the beginning.

It would be sacrilege to start anywhere other than Delicate Arch.