St. Louis - The Gateway to the West

The Arch is 630 feet tall (about twice the size of the Statue of Liberty) and the trip to the top takes about 4 minutes. You travel in 8 pods that seat 5 people each, and travel up one leg of the Arch, then travel down the other. The ride to the top is pretty scary, because the pods rock kind of like a Ferris wheel, but there is also a rickety clicking sound, which really starts to induce fear. The tram was built in 1967, making it 37 years old. That was enough to scare me into not wanting to go up. But I did it, and it was well worth it.

We stood underneath the Arch as we prepared to go into it. The entrance to the museum and gift store is at the base of the archway, and are partly built underground. The Arch is much larger in person than it looks in pictures, which is something that I couldn't capture from underneath it. Even in these pictures here, it looks small, almost like one of those plastic models that you put together poorly then seal the deal with that glue that gets you high. "Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue."

Because I was in the last picture, my Mom had two options - cut me out or cut the top part of the Arch out. Sorry for saying this St. Louis, but I'm more important than your Arch. But that doesn't mean that the Arch doesn't have feelings, so I included it in it's entirety for the following picture seen below.

As I mentioned on the previous page, my timing always seems to be impeccable. If you are even a casual visitor to this site, you should know of my fascination with sunsets. I don't need to tell you this because you possess the necessary tools to pick apart images and decipher them (eyes and the brain), but the Arch just looks so much better at dusk. The picture on the left is still one of my favorites that I have ever taken in my 3 + years of being a semi-professional photographer. On the right I provide a scale for how massive this Archway actually is, although from the camera's perspective, we are still at odds because I am not standing right next to it.

In order to get to the top of the Arch (and the viewing area that gives you an out of this world view of St. Louis and the Mississippi River) you need to pay a fee and take a tram to the top. These cars look like Dr. Evil's escape pod from Austin Powers (or better yet, like a hardboiled egg) and seat about 5 people in very close comfort to one another.

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