This is a picture from Arches National Park and a geology spring field trip form Western State College of Colorado. It was shot with a 3 mega pixel Fuji Finepix camera. If anyone is serious about this image, I can re-produce it. I was not very good with Photoshop back in April 2002, but I am a lot better now. I can fix the problems with the hard lines between shadow and sunlight, and fix the halo around Joel's Hair, and balance the colors to be much more realistic. A full resolution print of this image hangs in the rock room at Western State College of Colorado.

Salt is one of the primary ingredients needed to form natural arches. Beneath the Delicate Arch there is a salt layer thousands of feet thick. The salt flows like water under the pressure of the overlying sandstone. Places where the salt flow away, the sandstone above collapses into the thick salt layer below. This causes earthquakes, and the sandstone above, at the surface, cracks, breaks and folds. Sometimes the cracks in the surface are close together. This forms a thin sandstone mesa. The sandstone mesas are occasionally narrow enough so that wind, rain, and snow are able to erode a hole completely through the cliff face sides of the mesa. The physics of the bonds in the sandstone cliff faces cause a parabolic pattern of exfoliation; thus arches form.