A question for very serious presidential history buffs: how many national monuments did President Theodore Roosevelt create? He was the first president with the authority to do so, since the passage of the Antiques Act of 1906, which was actually fairly late in TR’s time in office. Of course, he’d been instrumental in its passage.

Not a man for half measures, the president created 18, including the very first, Devils Tower in Wyoming, coming in at over 1,300 acres, as he took advantage of the fact that the law didn’t limit the size of the monuments. Some of TR’s national monument designations no longer apply, since they later became national parks, such as Petrified Forest, Lassen Peak, Mount Olympus and especially the Grand Canyon.

One by TR that retains its monument status is Natural Bridges National Monument in southern Utah. Created on April 16, 1908, it measures more than 7,600 acres, featuring some of the largest natural bridges in the Western Hemisphere. Natural Bridges also happens to be the first established of Utah’s many national parks and monuments, created about eight years before the National Park Service itself.

We arrived late in the afternoon of May 18.

As NPS entities go, Natural Bridges isn’t that large, and can be accessed via a ring road that passes within sight of three major natural bridges. At each, you have the choice of looking at the natural bridge from a viewpoint near the road, or following a trail closer to the feature. Each bridge also has a Hopi name.

Sipapu Bridge.

The NPS calls this a “mature” natural bridge, and it is the monument’s tallest and greatest in span. “It endures very little stream erosion because its abutments stand far from the stream,” the pamphlet says.

Kachina Bridge.

A little hard to see, but it’s the dark curve almost filled by a tree in my pic. It’s young, according to the park service, with canyon floodwaters still at work enlarging its span.

At the beginning of the trail to Owachomo Bridge.

We took a walk closer to Owachomo, about 20 minutes each way.

We encountered no snakes along the way to the bridge. I think we would have heard one before seeing it, anyway. Owachomo’s an “old” bridge, the NPS says: “The bridge may now have a fatal crack, or it may stand for centuries.”

Yep. We didn’t go quite all the way to its underside, since it was time to call it a day — an extraordinary day, as any day that includes Monument Valley and Natural Bridges and the Moki Dugway would be, but exhausting.