Mesa Arch Sunrise: Why Everyone Shows Up at Five a.m.

The alarm goes off at four in the morning. By five, you are at the Mesa Arch trailhead on the Island in the Sky mesa, walking a half-mile loop in the dark. By the time the eastern horizon starts to lighten, you are not alone. There are photographers with tripods. There is a line along the arch for the shot.

Mesa Arch is not, by the standards of Arches National Park twelve miles to the northeast, a particularly large or rare formation. Its span is roughly thirty feet, modest enough that a tall person could touch both sides of the opening without moving their feet. What it does, which is the only thing that matters at five in the morning, is frame the canyon floor eight hundred feet below. When the sun clears the La Sal Mountains to the east, the light pours through the arch and sets the underside of the sandstone on fire. The canyon below, still in shadow, drops away behind it. For approximately fifteen minutes, the geometry is perfect.

The Canyonlands mesa you are standing on is the Island in the Sky, a wedge of plateau several hundred feet above the surrounding terrain, connected to the canyon rim by a single narrow neck of land. The Ute people traveled and camped on this mesa for generations, using it as a vantage point over the canyon country below. The NPS visitor center at the mesa's entrance has exhibits on both indigenous occupation and Powell's eighteen sixty-nine river exploration.

The sunrise photograph of Mesa Arch appears on more Utah tourism materials than almost any other image in the state. The arch itself, if you arrive at ten in the morning, is a quiet, easily walkable half-mile loop that most visitors have largely to themselves.