Last week I joined a lumbering parade of gas-hungry RVs and SUVs going to Arches National Park near Moab. Crossing the prehistoric red stones we looked like a pilgrimage to the fossilized source of our life-giving oil.

I love tourist sites, and Arches is special to me not just for the otherworldly scenery, but for the people-watching. And whether Niagara Falls, the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon or Arches, tourist crowds are like a sea of diversity, a performance-art parade of haircuts, body shapes, accents, fashion statements and shoe leather.

I play the "nationality game" and try to figure out where people are from. If you're in a group, you can assign regions (East Asia, France, Germany, etc.) and keep score.

I can tell by the shoes. Germans wear dark socks with sandals. Italians pad about in the latest chic designs and Americans wear day-glow running shoes and basketball high-tops.

And I love that, "I'm tired and I want to go back to the hotel" or "Where are we going now, Stanley?" sound the same in any dialect - the international language of the dysfunctional family.

I walked the Devil's Garden trail at the farthest end of the park. It is a labyrinth of redstone ridges banged into towers and arches by time. The rocks on the main trail are worn flat with traffic and the arch sites are crowded with point-and-clickers.

There is that awkwardness about whether to greet every passer-by on tourist trails. "Hello" and "Hot, ain't it?" turns to a curt "Hey" from me and then just a nod and smile to the next few before I just look straight ahead and walk.

I was at full greeting indifference when I got to the first high ridge and ran into a group of Mormons from Provo. They wore BYU hats, smiled a lot and were very chatty.

I am afraid of Mormons. And there I am in Utah, on their turf, and I'm thinking they might drag me to some compound out in the desert and I'll come back wearing a BYU hat, smiling and being downright chatty.

I shook them on the switchbacks and rocky steeps of the "primitive trail" at the end of the canyon and found a quiet spot to watch the sunset light up the red rocks. I looked down at my very "American" day-glo running shoes and then felt bad. Maybe they were just being nice (or maybe they did put something in my water).

Charles Agar's e-mail address is cagar@aspentimes.com