What an amazing place this is - so many films have been filmed here. It was just like being on a real, life filmset - we were!
We stayed overnight at an original 1920’s Trading Post – where Navajo Indians used to trade hand made blankets and livestock for supplies. The trading post continues to sell a number of authentic hand-crafter Navajo souvenirs such as pottery, rugs and jewellery. A couple of hours drive and large mesa’s began to dominate the horizon into the Tribal NP and the scenery became even more spectacular. From the gift shop on a small hill, 4WD trucks crawled like ants along a dirt road with colossal fiery red monoliths towering above them. It was an extraordinary landscape, like nothing we’d ever seen before. We drove the rough 17 mile track around the park. Everywhere was red and dusty and the flat desert was punctuated by these colossal monoliths rising 100’s of metres, with sheer sides out of piles of rocky shale, often eroded into unusual shapes including narrow spires defying both the forces of nature and gravity. We stopped for lunch at Sand Springs – we could have whiled away hours here. It was blissfully peaceful and totally awe-inspiring. The landscape here has been showcased in hundreds of westerns and we could re-create the cowboy’s pistol ricochet by slamming the car boot! The vista at Artists Point was mesmerizing, 100’s of miles of flat red desert accentuating the grand monoliths in all their rugged splendour. North of Monument Valley we stopped at Goosenecks State Park where the San Juan River loops back and forth in a series of S-bends over 1000ft below the desert surface. Having carved its way through layers of sedimentary rock uplifted millions of years ago, it really was an incredible sight.
The South West revealed itself as a showcase of nature’s most dramatic formations, it really is remarkable. A rollercoaster of a drive east of Goosenecks took us through the aptly named Valley of the Gods – more huge sandstone monoliths dominated the landscape but here they were more frequent and often thousands of metres in length giving the area a greater intensity than Monument Valley. It was a more jumbled collection and less regal, but never-the-less mind-blowing. It wasn't a long day but the seemingly endless expanse of overwhelming topography that we encountered left us feeling somewhat dumbfounded and we decided to retire early in an effort to comprehend it all!
