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A friend once put to me that the only significant thing in travel was the human contact. Travelling was about changing the perspective and only human interaction could do that. A town was a shell if it wasn't illuminated by people. It seemed a bit strident, but hard to gainsay. What about the simple beauty of a view, I ventured.... That really raised her disgust; rank sentimentality, she reckoned.

Eventually I marshalled a few thoughts against it, in the Utah Desert. There is barely a human dimension to the place - just an occasional traffic sign (with the inevitable bullet holes), dusty tracks and railroads marked by lines of tipsy telegraph poles - but it has an extraordinary presence.

The most striking things when you first arrive in the desert are the scale and the stillness. The mountains are massive red sandstone lumps, their vertical faces rising to table-tops or dropping sheer into canyons. There is sparse vegetation, no movement. The sky is huge: on the plains it hangs over you like an enormous blue (and usually cloudless) bowl. The sun tracks a cruel path across it; quick to rise and then lingering overhead. Barely an animal or insect moves in the heat of the day. The sky is so still that aircraft vapour trails tie it into a vast cat's cradle.

The absence of a human element in such grand surroundings is apt to bring on a philosophical turn, if you're given to that sort of thing. It is easy to feel dwarfed in a place like this; the size of the mountains speaks of unimaginable geological power, and the stillness speaks of the permanence in the landscape. It highlights human frailty.

And there is the beauty of the place too - worth admiring, however sentimental it might be. Offset by the blue of sky, the massive beds of rock stand out in surprising colours. Red, yellow and cream-coloured rock are interspersed like the layers of a cake, here and there tinged with brown and green, or topped with bright white icing. The long light of morning and evening gives the rock a rich and luxurious glow.

For all the apparent permanence, within a protracted, geological time-scale, sandstone is in fact quite quick to change. As I looked around the desert, I could see rock in all stages of decay and change. Erosion in action. The crust, a mile-deep deposit of hundreds of millions of years of sedimentation, has been exposed and then steadily and unevenly eroded in the past ten million years. Water has got to work on it, freezing in the stone and cracking it, or simply dissolving it and gouging channels (sand in solution is abrasive and this increases the wearing down process).

Cracks become canyons, which meander in jigsaw patterns, ever widening until they link up and there is more gulley than mountain - a landscape of isolated outcrops is left. These are mesas (table-tops from the Spanish) and buttes. They look like lines of ragged red teeth, their sheer faces dropping to angled gums of rubble that has fallen from above. Occasionally the main face throws off a spire, a slender three or four hundred foot column struck in a peremptory pose, like a single-finger insult.

And the erosion continues, as the house-sized shards of rock fall off the cliff-faces. The table-tops erode further into fins, saw-toothed ranges, and eventually reduce to towers, individual lumps of sandstone which stand solitary in the plains. In its final throes the decaying rock is whittled down into curious rounded shapes standing in a line, like a queue of shrouded figures. Occasionally rocks sit balanced on perilous supports, seemingly poised to jump. In places arches have formed as the base-rock has been eroded. (Just as there is a National Park in Utah called Canyonlands, so there is one called Arches.)

When you stand beneath rockfaces such as these you get an urgent idea of the erosion at work. The lumps of rock are simply massive and you can see the faults where the next slab will slip off and crash down the mountainside. Another sudden and sharp reminder of human frailty. At such precarious angles they look as though they could drop off at any moment. Thankfully the chances of human and geological time coinciding are slim. It is unlikely that the next piece will fall even in your lifetime, let alone the few seconds in which you are underneath it.

Who knows if other visitors are affected in the same way by the Utah Desert. It would be fun to try it out on my friend and see if I could get a reaction out of her.

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