Scorpius Arch

I'm always looking for new places to explore and capture with my camera in Joshua Tree National Park. While scouting one of the less visited areas I spotted this really rugged looking area and thought it would be a good spot to check out sometime. A few weeks later I started making plans. First I used Google Earth to scout the area using satellite images and made a plan on where to go. Since the area is wilderness and no trails to follow I decided to use 2 different washes to navigate through the rocky area. I marked them on Google maps and headed out. Fired up Google Maps and it totally failed me. There was no cell or data service where I was and that might have been part of the problem. It showed the spots I had marked were on top of San Gorgonio mountain instead of the desert where they were supposed to be. Getting lost in the desert is not an option. People die every year from getting lost in the desert so I always carry a map and compass in case electronics fail. Google Maps is great for driving directions but I'll never trust it again for hiking. Fortunately the day before I had downloaded Gaia GPS to my phone so I started it up but was unable to figure out how to get the information from Google Maps over to Gaia GPS. I decided to hike around anyway and see what I could find. I started Gaia's tracking mode and headed out. (I've been using Gaia GPS ever since and it's worked flawlessly) It was about a mile hike through the sand till I came to the rock outcroppings and followed the edge towards the west till I found a wash that lead into the rocky area. I headed into the wash and spent a few hours hiking and climbing around scouting the area. There were a lot of shallow caves and really small arches and I felt like this was a really good area to keep exploring to look for larger arches. The only tracks in the sand were mine which made it easy to retrace my footsteps out of the area. As I started to turn back towards the direction of my car I noticed something in the distance that looked like it could be an arch. As I approached it, it became clear that indeed it was a small arch. I took a few shots of it, created a waypoint with the gps software and took a photo of it with a phone app called Sun Surveyor so that I could check later how the sun and the milky way line up with the arch.

I first found the arch in March of 2016. I wouldn't say that I discovered it because I've found out since that some of the locals knew of it, but none of the Park officials knew of it's existence. There were no footprints in the sand anywhere and you could tell no one had been there for at least a couple of years. It lines up perfectly for a night time Milky Way shots, so in June I brought my friend Bodhi Smith out to shoot the Milky Way over the arch around midnight. While sitting around waiting I was trying to come up with a name for the photo. Because of it's similar shape I wanted a name that kinda rhymed with the famous Mobius arch located in the Alabama hills at the base of Mt. Whitney.. Bodhi started pointing out different stars, planets and constellations. Scorpio was right above the arch. I opened the Stellarium app on my phone to check out the constellations and there it was, "Scorpius". I had no idea that the constellation Scorpio was also known as Scorpius. The perfect name for my arch photo since I thought that it looked a little like a scorpion's tail and there were a lot of scorpions out on this warm summer night. We even found a scorpion hanging out in the alcove of the arch. I posted my shot on some of the Facebook groups and Instagram calling it Scorpius Arch and the name stuck. Joshua Tree National Park even posted the photo on their Instagram page a number of times calling it Scorpius Arch, so I guess the names official.