The Terra Galleria Blog – QT Luong

Natural rock arches are rare in California’s deserts compared to places like Utah because of differences in geology and climate. Most natural arches form in soft sandstone, but California’s desert regions have mostly harder granite, metamorphic, or volcanic rocks. Freeze-thaw cycles and sustained water flows are less frequent than on the Colorado Plateau. Yet a few arches can be found in the Alabama Hills, Death Valley National Park, and Joshua Tree National Park.

Photographing Arch Rock

Joshua Tree National Park’s largest natural arch is a 25-foot Arch Rock near the White Tanks Campground. Back in 2013, when I last visited Arch Rock, the formation was already well-known enough to be mentioned in the two most popular national park guides at that time. Yet, none of the people I talked to were aware of the arch, and in each of my visits, I encountered only a few other people on the trail. This is even though it was a short half-a-mile loop, called the Arch Rock Nature Trail. As the trail winds through granite boulders, the arch remains hidden until the last minute. If you were not looking for it, you could easily miss it, as you have to squeeze through boulders on the south side of the trail.

Such a small subject offers so many possibilities. You can crawl through the arch and photograph both sides, which have distinct characters. The shape of the opening varies dramatically with the viewpoint, so it pays to explore around. Several compositions are possible including the entire rock or framing the opening more tightly. I find the west side from which one comes the more impressive. It is directly lit in the afternoon, but backlight also works well, especially with a sun star.

I returned at night and illuminated the arch with a camping lantern. In the opening image, I used the same lantern but added a color accent with the red light from my headlamp to the second image. I processed it with a warmer balance than the image below. Given that at day, visitors were infrequent, I was surprised that photographers showed up shortly thereafter. Even in the dark, this place was no longer just my own.

The Changing Experience of Arch Rock

By 2025, the Arch Rock had become known enough that my brother-in-law had placed it on his list. I relied on the notes in Treasured Lands, which say to start the trail in the White Tank Campground, opposite Campsite 9. Driving on the Pinto Basin Road from the north, I noticed a sign pointing to a parking area marked “Arch Rock Trail” towards the west side of the road, half a mile before the White Tanks Campground entrance. It made no sense to me since I remembered that Arch Rock, like the White Tanks Campground, is located on the east side of the road. At the entrance of the campground, we were surprised to see a sign prohibiting parking in the campground. Instead, we parked at a shoulder down the road and after walking into the campground, found the trailhead exactly as indicated in the book. However, on the nature trail, I was confused by several intersecting other trails that I did not remember. We suddenly found ourselves amid a steady stream of visitors. The sense of solitude I had once found here was gone. What had once been a quiet, somewhat overlooked corner of the park removed from the areas with larger rock piles and Joshua trees had become a well-trodden destination, a shift not just in its popularity, but in how one experiences nature.

I realized the other visitors had parked at the trailhead established in the interleaving decade. The small parking area inside the campground near Campsite 9 would not accommodate the crowd we saw, therefore the National Park Service directed day hikers to the parking area we previously saw. From there, the arch is 1.4 miles round-trip, instead of the 0.5 miles round-trip from the campground. I’ll have to make an update for the 10th printing of Treasured Lands.

Since it had been twelve years, I thought we’d follow the crowds even when we saw a sign pointing to “Heart Rock”. Visitors were lined up to have their picture taken with the aptly named rock. We looked around in the surrounding nook and crates for Arch Rock without success before backtracking to the previous trail intersection, from which we caught the older nature trail and located the arch. Including our group, there were dozens there, and we quickly took a group picture to leave the place to others. Needless to say, I did not attempt to photograph the arch. This was a different wilderness experience—one shaped not just by the landscape.

Seeking Solitude at Scorpius Arch

Although these days, my photography is no longer focused on national parks, I keep an intense interest in finding new experiences and places in them. The next day, Lanchi and I went looking for Scorpius Arch. Southern California photographer Chip Morton had named the little-known formation that way because when he captured night photographs of the arch in 2016, the constellation of Scorpio loomed above, while a scorpion was hanging out. The name suggested a fleeting intersection of the cosmic and the terrestrial, an alignment of time, place, and presence. Although the arch provided a marker for the visit, I was mostly curious to see an area of the park I had overlooked before.

The experience of visiting Scorpius Arch couldn’t be more different from Arch Rock. From the Joshua Tree National Park North Entrance Station, we drove about 40 miles along the mostly straight and deserted highway that forms the park’s boundary before stopping our Prius near a San Bernardino County roadside call box (62-712) in the middle of nowhere. The area, part of the vast Joshua Tree Wilderness, is undeveloped and has no trails, but walking across the desert along the flat wash plain was easy and rewarded with a close look at vegetation I had not noticed in the desert before, such as the curiously textured California Dodder, a parasitic plant consisting of a bunch of orange vines twisted like spaghetti.

Unlike Arch Rock, which is tucked around other tall boulders, Scorpius Arch rises directly above desert flats, facing the north. If you know what to look for, you can easily spot it from the highway, with a perspective comparable to the photograph above. Morton’s trip report makes it sound like quite an adventure, but if you hike straight to the arch, it is only a fifteen-minute walk.

It would be a pity, however, to only do a quick round-trip to the arch. As is almost always the case, the journey is more interesting than the destination. I wished it would have taken me more wandering before finding the arch – like Morton did. Afterward, we scrambled on the piles of boulders to survey the landscape. We spotted several formations that seemed on the verge of transformation, narrow gaps, and half-formed windows where erosion had nearly, but not quite, carved its way through, except for another tiny arch. Jagged heaps of weathered granite, stacked stories high, took on the eerie resemblance of colossal animal skulls, their hollowed-out depressions like vacant, staring eyes. We found a formation similar to the famous Skull Rock but without several dozen visitors around. In fact, for the entire duration of our visit, we didn’t see anybody, even in the distance. It was a stark contrast to the experience at Arch Rock—two versions of the desert, one shaped by access and popularity, the other by silence and obscurity. That is for the better, as I noticed patches of fragile cryptobiotic soil, common in Utah deserts, but rare in the California deserts. If you visit the area, please stick to sandy areas and rocks!

In the evolving dialogue between people and the land, these arches—both celebrated and obscure—become markers of changing relationships with the wild. Once a space of solitude and personal discovery, the landscape is increasingly mediated by infrastructure, social expectation, and digital circulation. The act of seeking an arch is no longer just an encounter with erosion and form but a negotiation between presence and absence. Once remote formations become destinations, their solitude is replaced by the weight of human attention. Where an arch might have once stood as a quiet anomaly of erosion, discovered only through wandering, it is now mapped, named, and indexed—its existence mediated through guidebooks, GPS coordinates, and social media posts. The untouched becomes inscribed, no longer just a geological curiosity but a site of expectation, shaped as much by human desire as by natural forces. Yet, in less-trafficked spaces, the experience remains ephemeral, the landscape still resisting categorization, offering a fleeting sense of discovery before it, too, is drawn into the network of known places. Within these spaces, the tension between accessibility and retreat plays out in real-time, revealing not only the physical transformations of the land but the shifting frameworks through which we construct wilderness itself.