Monument Valley
Interesting facts
- Harry Goulding, who ran a trading post at the edge of the valley, sent photographs of it to John Ford during the Depression, and Ford chose it for Stagecoach.
- Goulding bought 640 acres here in 1921 and built his trading post in 1928; it later became a lodge listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
- Sergio Leone shot part of Once Upon a Time in the West here in 1967, the first Spaghetti Western filmed outside Europe.
- Forrest Gump's famous cross-country run comes to an end in Monument Valley.
- Besides Stagecoach and The Searchers, John Ford also filmed Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon against these buttes.
- Uranium was mined between 1945 and 1967 from the Shinarump conglomerate at the southern end of the Monument Upwarp, alongside traces of vanadium and copper.
- The red of the valley comes from iron oxide, while the darker blue-grey streaks on some rocks are stained by manganese oxide.
- The valley floor lies 5,000 to 6,000 feet above sea level, on siltstone laid down by the meandering rivers that carved out the landscape.
- Local names for the formations include King-on-his-Throne, Rooster Rock, Setting Hen, Brigham's Tomb and the stone opening known as the Eye of the Sun.
Why it is worth it
Monument Valley is the landscape many people picture when they hear the words "the American West", even if they have never been there. Across a flat red plain on the border of Arizona and Utah, isolated buttes and mesas rise up to about 300 metres above the valley floor, their vertical walls standing on skirts of rubble. The Navajo name, Tsรฉ Biiสผ Ndzisgaii, is usually rendered as "valley of the rocks". The valley lies inside the Navajo Nation, and the Navajo Tribal Council set it aside as a tribal park in 1958.
The shapes are a lesson in layered geology. At the bottom is soft Organ Rock Shale, which weathers into the sloping aprons; above it sits the thick, cliff-forming de Chelly Sandstone that makes the sheer faces; and many summits are protected by a hard cap of Shinarump conglomerate over Moenkopi beds. Where the cap survives, a butte keeps its flat top; where it has gone, the sandstone is whittled down into spires. The deep red comes from iron oxide in the weathered rock. The best-known silhouettes are the West and East Mitten Buttes, whose narrow side pinnacles look like thumbs on a pair of mittens, Merrick Butte beside them, and the slender, heavily eroded Totem Pole.
The valley became a screen icon through John Ford, who filmed Stagecoach here in 1939 and came back for My Darling Clementine, The Searchers and several other Westerns. Countless films, advertisements and road-trip photographs have followed, yet the place still delivers more than the images promise: the scale of the walls, the silence of the plain, and the way the light changes the colour of the rock from orange at midday to deep crimson at sunset. For the Navajo it remains a lived-in, sacred landscape.
Inside the park a dirt road of about 17 miles loops among the buttes past a series of viewpoints. Other parts of the valley, such as Mystery Valley and Hunts Mesa, can be seen only with a Navajo guide.
Getting there
The park is on US Highway 163, about 22 miles (35 km) north of Kayenta, Arizona, and 25 miles (40 km) south-west of Mexican Hat, Utah. The nearest large town is Farmington, New Mexico, about 170 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport is Page Municipal Airport (PGA), some 120 km away in a straight line; most visitors arrive by car on a road trip through the Colorado Plateau.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Monument Valley is a region of the Colorado Plateau characterized by a cluster of sandstone buttes, with the largest reaching 1,000ย ft (300ย m) above the valley floor. The most famous butte formations are located in northeastern Arizona along the UtahโArizona state line. The valley is considered sacred by the Navajo Nation, the Native American people within whose reservation it lies.
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