Base of Delicate Arch

Walk the last slickrock to Delicate Arch and you pass formations nearly as big as the arch itself — smooth, bulbous masses of sandstone rounded by the wind.

Photographed June 2003. A huge near mass fills the frame, sensuous in the side light — and there, tiny in the distance at right, stands the famous arch itself. The contrast of scale is the picture: the giant foreground stone and the small, world-famous span beyond it.