Nov. 9 & 10, 2014
For about 4 or 5 days, at our Goosenecks camp site, we'd been seeing the spires of Monument Valley peaking up above the horizon:
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| Monument Valley spires on the horizon |
So one morning we had breakfast in Bluff, Utah at the Twin Peaks Trading Post...
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Good food in Bluff, Utah
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...and headed for Monument Valley:
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| Approaching Monument Valley |
Monument Valley belongs to the Navajo Nation, and they've built an extensive Visitors' Center with gift shop, restaurant, and headquarters for several types of tours. We could have chosen a guided tour of the 17-mile loop through the Park, but you pay quite a bit of money to sit in a covered, but open-sided jeep or flatbed truck with 10 or 12 others, while the Navajo guide drives the truck and narrates through speakers. Now, this sounds OK, but the road is dirt, and the tours leave every 5 minutes or so, which means each truckload of tourists eats the dust of the truck in front--for the entire hour-long drive. Of course, they also see the sights through the same dust. The Navajo guide, by the way, sits in the cab of the truck--with windows up. Quite a few tourists in one truck had bandanas tied around their faces; they looked like bandits or terrorists.
Instead of the tour (or driving ourselves, another option), we decided to do the 3 1/2 mile hike around Mitten Butte. It was as empty as the drive was crowded--and no dust. On the way to the trailhead, though, I spotted a few Navajo hogans that were open and wandered inside. I expected nothing much; after all, these were basically mud structures. However, once my eyes adjusted to the dark, I was surprised by the beauty in the roof supports:
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| Logs woven together to provide support for the roof |
I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that this 'woven logs' technique is the same roof support structure that the Anasazi used in the great Kivas at Chaco Canyon and elsewhere 1000 years ago.
On to the Mitten Butte hike:
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| Note sliver of sky upper right center; looks like a knife or scimitar. |
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| Almost all the way around Mitten Butte |
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| John Wayne is out there somewhere... |
By the time we finished the hike it was nearly dark: too late for the loop drive. However, there was still time to set up the tripod alongside the other 30 photographers and shoot Monument Valley at sunset:
We drove back the next day to take the tour, but decided the guided tour was not for us. Instead, we paid the $20 to drive our truck along the same loop. It was magnificent. And even though we had the windows up and the air on "recirculate", we still got dusty. We can't imagine what torture those tourists on the guided tours must have endured! Wait! Actually, we can: we were caught outside in a dust storm so bad that all I saw when I looked at Leah, whom I was touching, was a brown shape. (My hair actually changed color--from white to a kind of sandstone. Stayed that way, too, until I washed it.) Here's a photo of the petering-out dust storm, taken after we scrambled back inside the truck:
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| Tail end of dust storm, Monument Valley |
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| Clearing a bit... |
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| In tact, but a bit dusty. |
Hope all is well with you...
