THE MERCURY MEASURES a buck five as I follow the Devils Garden Trail around monumental fins of red rock rising from the desert floor.  All around me is what looks like a giant bonsai garden of juniper, pinon pine, and yucca.  I'm lugging only the essentials for my day hike: food, water and almost as important to me- 13 pounds of camera gear, including tripod.  this is after all, photographers' heaven.

A lone jogger approaches. "Man, I've been trying to find the trail for an hour," he says panting.  I reorient him and off he goes, navigating across bare rock marked only by stone cairns.  Indeed, rocks are the main attraction in this 76,519-acre park, created in 1971 to protect one of the world's greatest concentrations of natural stone arches.  "There are over 2,200 documented so far," says park education technician Miriam Graham.  "new ones are being formed; old ones are collapsing.  As I like to say, the rocks are alive."

The park lures more than 700,000 people every year, many of whom come with the same mission as mine.  To shoot the perfect picture of an arch, capturing some magical arrangement of light, shadow, and angle.  You can find plenty of subjects in a day, which is one of this park's great appeals.

As I drive the 18-mile scenic road, I stop at viewpoints and trailheads that lead deeper into this eroded rockscape.  Many of the trails are short, including the mile-and-a half route to Delicate Arch, probably the most photographed formation of them all.   Visiting  Delicate arch is like seeing the Mona Lisa at the Louvre:  It's great to behold, but there's so much more to discover.  I want to find an arch all my own.

Tom Till, a nature photographer with a gallery in nearby Moab, had recommended the Devils Garden Trail, a seven-mile loop that is the longest maintained path in the park.  "You'll find more variety of arches there than anywhere else," he told me.

At the trail head, I read the posted warnings about dehydration and mountain lions, then head an easy mile in to my first real find, what Till calls " a truly amazing freak of nature" Landscape Arch, whose 306-foot span is reputedly the second longest in the world, is a narrow ribbon of sandstone held up largely by a suspension of disbelief.  But it demands a sunrise shot, and by the time I get there, shad has drained it of color.  I keep moving.

The wide, groomed trail quickly turns into a more tenuous footpath sandwiched between two monolithic rock fins.  A lizard scampers by in a flash of bright turquoise, while a cottontail quivers under the rabbit brush, pretending to be invisible.  I play along continuing on a side trail that doubles back at a higher elevation.

I reach Partition Arch and see that it's really two separate arches opening to views of distant buttes.  But the arches themselves are just frames to the picture, and that won't do.  Navajo Arch, in turn, gazes inward, like the mouth of a cave, opening onto an inner sanctum boxed by stone walls and domed by a brilliant blue sky.  This arch has obvious appeal.  Three different couples ask me to photograph them here.  It's the kind of place you'd want to get married in.  But it's a technical shot.  My light meter goes off like a Geiger counter, swinging wildly between blinding light and inky shadows.  No amount of exposure adjusting can pull it all together.  Again, I move on.

The beauty of this trail is that there's always another arch, and I have a particular one in mind.  Chris Moore, who has personally discovered hundreds of arches, helped compile a database, available on compact disc, that catalogs over 2,000 of the park's formations.  Slide it into a laptop, punch in the attributes you want-say high photographic ranking, Devils Garden area -- and press "enter".  The first of my search results was Double O Arch and it's less than a mile away.

As I slide down a large boulder, I think of the lost jogger I met and wonder, "How could anyone lose this trail?"  Then I learn how firsthand, discovering that cairns are like spouses: They're easy to take for wanted, but as soon as you stop noticing them, you're in trouble.  Suddenly, I see no cairns in any direction.  The last one I noticed was atop that boulder I just descended.  So, with my foot wedged into the crotch of a juniper limb, I laboriously hoist myself back up the side.

My mistake was thinking the trail would be too tame to surmount a huge rock fin.  Wrong.  Now I see the cairns again.  They lead me over the fin, where I can see towering clouds scudding through a brilliant blue sky.  Devils Garden spreads out below, a labyrinth of vertical rock slabs and desert scrub reminiscent of a Hieronymus Bosch depiction of hell.

As I come off the fin and hike up a sandy path, Moore's words echo in my head  "there's nothing like rounding a corner and discovering an arch,"  Even though I know it's coming the sight of the Double O Arch floors me, like seeing a double rainbow caught in stone.

After crawling through the lower arch, I set my tripod on the other side, where the sun glazes the rock with a glowing varnish.  I take a meter reading, click down the aperture, dial in the shutter speed, squint through the viewfinder-and then it hits me.  An arch has universal appeal, whether it be a natural stone arch, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, or the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.  The grace and strength of the form inspires a sense of grandeur and the compulsive need to capture the spectacle on film (or memory card, as the case may be).

I shoot from one angle, then another.  I shoot until bats are fitting over head, and the last glimmer of sunlight slips from the stone.

Did I get the perfect shot?  Not really.  But that just gives me an excuse to come back and try again.

              
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