Delicate Arch: From Schoolmarm's Bloomers to State Symbol

The arch on Utah's license plate has not always been called Delicate Arch. On early twentieth-century maps, the same formation appeared under the name Schoolmarm's Bloomers, a description that made sense to anyone who saw the shape from below and had a certain sense of humor about it. The current name came from a nineteen thirty-four guide written by Frank Beckwith, editor of the Millard County Chronicle, who surveyed the Arches area at the request of the National Park Service.

Getting to the arch requires a three-mile round-trip hike up open slickrock with a final approach along a narrow ledge. The arch is not visible until the last few hundred feet of that approach, which means the first sight of it, a fifty-two-foot freestanding span of salmon-colored sandstone poised above a bowl of canyon, arrives without warning. Edward Abbey, who worked as a ranger in Arches in the nineteen fifties, wrote that Delicate Arch was one of the few features he trusted to outlast human civilization's appetite for turning everything into a destination.

Utah placed the arch on the state license plate in nineteen ninety-six, completing the transformation from local joke to official symbol. Annual visitation to the Delicate Arch trailhead now measures in the hundreds of thousands. Start times before eight in the morning are recommended in summer to beat both the heat and the line of other hikers waiting on the same narrow ledge for the same photograph.

The arch is about one hundred fifty million years of sandstone compressed into a frame that opens onto a canyon. The photograph does not capture the silence.