Vermilion Dragonflies

The northeastern flank of Salt Valley in Arches National Park is a sloping ridge of white sandstone. The ridge is broken every few yards by a set of horizontal cracks, the result of faulting when the ridge was formed, which run the entire length of the Salt Valley ridge. Some of them are filled with sand and vegetation, but others are offset and deep, and too wide to jump across. It is an extremely difficult environment to explore. The ridge is cut every few hundred yards by a dry wash carved into the stone, and it's possible to work your way down the ridge to Salt Wash along these corridors.

During the summer monsoon season, when afternoon thunderstorms bring rain to the desert, the potholes in the washes fill with water and team with life. Shrimp, tadpoles, "predacious diving beetles", and a host of other bugs and pond scum race through their life cycles before the water dries out. The potholes are archipelagos of life in a sea of burning stone that stretches to the distant horizon.

Salt Valley anticline
A wash on the outer slope of Salt Valley near Arches National Park.

Vermilion red dragonflies hunt in the washes up and down the gently sloping ridge. Their glittering wings clatter loudly in the heat and silence of the summer afternoon. The dragonflies always come and check us out when we go hiking down there, and they're our constant companions as we explore up and down the hillside. For years we called them the "vermilion dragonflies", but we finally identified them as Libellula saturata, aka "Flameskimmers".

This website is dedicated to the west we love, especially the high desert of the Colorado Plateau, and we've named it in honor of our dragonfly companions.