Recently PBS aired The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. The series has inspired this sequence of blog postings about aspects of my personal park explorations over the years via ArcGIS Explorer (AGX). See other national park blog posts for more.

We’re moving through my Fav 7. Today, Arches. I began visiting the Moab, UT area in the early 1990s. Part of the Colorado Plateau, it is steeped in compelling natural features and geological wonder, including Arches National Park. I remember my first visit of seeing arches, fins, petrified sand dunes and found myself wanting to understand the why and how. In a nutshell, it involves uplift in the Uncompahgre Mountains (part of the ancestral Rockies) and subsidence in an area known as the Paradox Basin. The next parts of the story entail water, salt deposition, repetition, erosion, gravity, and time. Result: An area that is home to some 2,000 sandstone arches.

So, how can I introduce this place with AGX and share its rich geological story (more adeptly than my arm-chair skill set)? I decide to do three things: Encapsulate readings, video, and other content links inside an AGX folder, use the Find GNIS features add-in to discover arch locations, and isolate and display information about some favs.

In my Web research on the park and its stars, I found lots of content. But rather than simply drop these into the post (which I am) or put them into my Web browser favorites, I want to associate them permanently with my AGX project. Solution: I create a new folder (Background) and I place it inside my Arches folder. Inside this I create a series of links to reading 1, video, animation, reading 2, and 3D virtual tour (with thanks to Shannon White). These are now ready for presentation inside my park project and I also can e-mail the folder to another AGX user.

Next, I locate all of the arches inside Grand County, UT using the Find GNIS add-in, select all and move them to the map. From this folder, I select my fav 3 and move them to their own folder. Here’s a depiction of many of the arches along the east side of the Salt Valley—a view I set for future exploration (see graphic 1 above).

Finally, I decide to use two recent Bernie Szukalski AGX blog posts to add some HTML and pin the pop-ups for a couple fav arches.

Stay tuned for the next installment.

- George Dailey, ESRI Education Program Manager