Anybody who's tried to get into Arches National Park in the last few years knows it's a zoo. The place draws crowds from all over the world, and the folks in Moab have been wrestling with that for a while now. So when I heard there's a pilot shuttle running from town out to two popular trailheads inside the park, I figured that's worth talking about.

The shuttle is in its pilot stage, which is another way of saying they're still working the bugs out. You can read the full rundown over at the original writeup, and I'd encourage it, because the reporting gets into details better than I can from a porch in Missouri. The short version, going by that writeup: the ride is free, the scenery out the window is about as good as it gets anywhere in this country, and the operation itself is still, well, kind of a mess.

I don't say that as a knock on the folks running it. Any pilot program is going to have rough edges, and a brand-new shuttle route in a busy park is going to have more than most. If you're used to the freedom of your own rig, it also takes some getting used to, planning your day around somebody else's timetable. That's the real trade-off for a country boy like me. I like leaving when I want, stopping at the overlooks nobody else stops at, keeping a cooler in the back. A shuttle asks you to give all that up.

But tell you what, give it up for a day at Arches and you might come around. That park is stretched past what its roads were built for, and every vehicle that rides the shuttle instead of crawling toward the gate is one less rig in the traffic. And the red rock out the window doesn't care whether you're driving or riding.

The word pilot is doing a lot of work here, and that's fine. Better to start small and work the kinks out than wait around for a perfect system that never shows up. Plenty of parks have gone down this road before and gotten their shuttles to where they just work. No reason Arches can't get there too.

My advice if you're headed that way this fall: give the shuttle a try, keep your plans loose, and don't bet your whole day on a pickup time until the thing proves it can hold a schedule. And if it runs late, sit still and watch the rocks. There are worse ways to blow twenty minutes.