Dave & Meredith's Travel Blog

After leaving Moab, we spent the day driving through beautiful scenery to Monument Valley. Monument Valley is one of those places that everyone has seen pictures of even if they didn’t know what it was called. The scenery is iconic Southwest America with vast plains dotted with lone rock buttes and mesas. Many commercials, TV shows and movies have been filmed here. The first films to make it famous were John Ford westerns starring John Wayne. A guy named Goulding owned a ranch in the Valley and wanted a way to provide jobs to local Navajo who were underemployed. He went to Hollywood and showed John Ford pictures of Monument Valley. John Ford was looking for a location for his next movie and the rest is history. Goulding is long gone but there is a resort, campground (where we stayed), and restaurant that still bear his name.

Now though, all of that is owned by the Navajo Nation. The entire Valley is part of the Navajo Tribal Park which is entirely owned and controlled by the Navajo. What this means is that visiting Monument Valley is a very different experience than visiting a US national park. For instance, we bought an annual pass to the US park system to save a lot of money but that didn’t apply here. Fair enough but we spent more fees to get in to the area for only a day than what you’d pay for a weekly pass to a US park. There’s more though. You can’t just go anywhere, even if there are roads that might take you where you want to go. You are only allowed on one 17-mile road which is unpaved and in poor condition. It also doesn’t necessarily show the best views of the Valley. You aren’t allowed in the park until after sunrise and you must leave before sunset. All of the above makes for pretty poor photography. On top of that, when we were there, the visitor center was closed for renovation.

All of that sounds pretty restrictive and it is. You can do more here but anything outside the above requires that you hire a Navajo guide and they must accompany you wherever you go. This gets expensive quickly. For anyone into photography, my recommendation is that unless you can afford a guide and make prior arrangements, photography will be a bit of a bust because of the time and place limitations. Looking through photo guidebooks I have, there are great things to take pictures of here (for example, the view from Hunt’s Mesa at sunrise looks amazing) but if I were to come back to Monument Valley, I’d only do it with a group willing to pitch in for a guide’s services.

We did the research on the above before we showed up so I can’t claim any of the above was a surprise but it’s hard to understand the meaning of the limitations without being here. It’s the difference between seeing it on paper and seeing it in action. In the end, we had planned to spend two nights here but we felt like we’d done all we could after staying only one so we left a day early for the Grand Canyon.

A few pictures below:

The tall column on the right is named the Totem Pole

A view over the Valley. The 17-mile road is visible in the foreground.

A view from the road.

This butte is part of a pair of buttes named The Mittens (hopefully for obvious reasons).

– Dave