Day 7: Monument Valley

Outside our motel window, the rising sun illuminated the boisterous San Juan River and the red rocks of southern Utah beyond. The sight enchanted us so much that before departing, we chose to spend a rare unscheduled moment to take in the landscape. We walked across the parking lot and looked down at the river thirty feet or so below us and then upstream to an arched bridge leading back out into the desert. From my perspective, I might have believed we had been abandoned on some Martian terrain. The two-story motel behind me and its adjoining restaurant and bar were the only structures around other than a couple smaller buildings in the distance, and the rolling, denuded land extended as far as I could see on the other side of the San Juan with nothing but a ribbon of asphalt to interrupt it.

I regretted we had planned only a one-night stay at the peacefully isolated San Juan Inn, especially after enduring the chaos at the South Rim the previous day. We hadn’t even had time to locate the namesake sombrero-shaped rock of the town of Mexican Hat, Utah, but we had another packed itinerary in front of us thanks to our detour around the Grand Canyon. However, little did I know that we would get the chance to come back one day. Just two years after we pulled out of the motel that cool Sunday morning, we would be eating fry bread and beef stew with our parents at the very restaurant we now passed.

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Monument Valley, a fixture of the American West, towered out of the desert alongside the never-ending roads of Route 66 postcards, its icons appearing like turrets and bastions of an enormous adobe fortress. The land lies within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation Reservation, and a small museum celebrating Navajo culture and history overlooks the valley near its entrance. An even larger gift shop specializes in handsome handmade vases and bowls as well as memorabilia relating to the numerous movies which have been filmed there, most notably John Wayne’s The Searchers. But, as much as I wanted to part with the rest of the money in my wallet on souvenirs, I was much more eager to explore.

Local guides stood ready to drive visitors into the sacred land and act as interpreters. If you don’t book one of these official tours, the only other option for tourists wanting to get closer to the buttes and mesas is to drive your own personal vehicle into the valley. With her usual moxie, Heather stepped up to the plate. We had already covered hundreds of miles of asphalt since we had flown into Salt Lake City; surely we could manage a few miles of sand and dirt. Heather sat down behind the wheel once more and started down the steep hill leading into the valley. As she inched cautiously along the makeshift road, our tires began to spin as they sought firm ground underneath the sand, and Heather hit the brakes for the first time of many on our trek. “Well, this should be fun,” I said, glancing nervously at Heather.

Thankfully, it didn’t take us long to arrive back on flat land, and at the beginning of the grand loop around the valley, Navajo artisans stood behind tables selling necklaces of juniper seeds and colorful translucent beads, reminding me of the vendors we had come across in the Kaibab Forest north of the Grand Canyon.

“Where are you from?” one woman asked as Heather fondled a bracelet strung with crimson beads. I told her we were from Virginia, back East, and she commented on how much grass we must have compared to the barren and dusty surroundings stretching out around us. “Yeah, here I think we have maybe one grass,” she said, chuckling. (On a subsequent trip to New Mexico, the owner of an art gallery told me that we Virginians must have to vacuum our yards quite often to contend with all of our grass. Smiling at her word choice, I agreed with her that I was much more familiar with cutting grass than she was.)

The seventeen-mile scenic drive meanders past towering pinnacles and imposing rocks with imaginative names like Elephant Butte and the Thumb. The sights hearkened back to the signature hoodoos of Bryce Canyon, but the ones here were on a more colossal scale. Whereas Bryce’s hoodoos could have been spires on some rock-hewn church, many of Monument Valley’s monoliths soared hundreds of feet into the sky and had a wide enough girth to house a small skyscraper.

We disembarked to take a few pictures near Thunderbird Mesa, a megalith named after an image of the mythical rainmaking creature on its side. From the arid appearance of the land, however, I could tell the Thunderbird hadn’t been around these parts lately. While we stood in the dry but intense heat stretching our muscles, a lean mutt moseyed over to us from nowhere in particular looking for a scrap of food or at least a scratch behind the ears. Where did this dog come from? I thought. To my eyes there seemed little around me to sustain life in the domain of the blazing sun. I couldn’t resist giving him some love, though, unaware that he had a host of fleas residing in his corn-colored fur; a few days later, mementos from my new friend in Arizona would materialize on my legs, and I would think the chicken pox had revisited me. We bid him farewell and watched him fade into the scenery as we drove on.

The vast desolation of the landscape amazed me. I had heard of countries and cities so overpopulated that their inhabitants hardly have space to live. But in this neck of Arizona, no permanent residents could be seen for miles, leaving the land open for visitors to exult and romp around. As we bumped along the rugged road winding through Monument Valley, I felt thankful to live in a country that could save its natural treasures from development and still have room to grow. Though the rhythms of my life are usually intertwined with a timeclock and a TV guide, I am reassured that whenever I need the rest, joy, or healing brought by verdant fields, frosted mountains, effervescent swampland, or even the solitude of the desert, the land is always there.

Heather edged our sedan over more hills blanketed in thick sand, passing lastly by the most recognizable rocks in the park: a trio of formations known as East Mitten, West Mitten, and Merrick Buttes. Each appeared like a crude sand castle still under construction, though these were on a scale more befitting a child of Paul Bunyan than the average beach goer. At their bases, dirt and rock had banked up around them, causing them to flare out close to the ground. In parks like Zion and the Grand Canyon, rivers had persistently whittled through the earth to form the canyons as we know them today, but what process had deposited these structures in the middle of the open desert in front of me? Here, erosion seemed to be the rule rather than the exception, sweeping away nearly everything in its path except where it appeared some Titan had punched the land upward from below.

Once we had passed by the buttes, our sights turned to our next challenge: surmounting the hill out of the valley. For the most part, we hadn’t had difficulty navigating the loop around the park. Our car had become temporarily stuck a couple of times, but we had been able to back out of these literal tourist traps and pursue alternate paths. Here, however, there was only one way out, and it entailed climbing a steep, sandy slope in a vehicle without four-wheel drive. Heather started up the ascent, tapping the gas with her toes and trying to discern a way around the deepest sand while more adventurous families sped by us in all-terrain SUVs. After a few false starts, we found our rhythm: we drove until the sand halted our progress, backed up, and circumvented the problem spot, all the while dodging oncoming cars since we were forced to straddle both “lanes.” Heather did a masterful job until the Nissan flopped into an unseen hole and our tires began grinding into the ground. I lurched forward in my seat as Heather jammed the brake down to keep our car from burrowing any further. My fears were confirmed when she turned to meet my eye. “Would you like to pray?” she asked.

This is where my memory goes black. Maybe it was the heat or the overwhelming fear that we might become a victim of the valley, trapped in our rental car to die of exposure and exhaustion. Either way, I can’t remember how we escaped that Godforsaken, albeit stunning and magnificent, valley. I can only imagine that Heather, in one of her moments of ruthless determination, clicked the gear shift into D one final time and floored our car to the side, but my only recollection of the event is a feeling of thankfulness. We had survived! I credit her driving, her tenacity, and God’s ever-present hand on our vehicle for getting us up the final hill, the back end of our car briefly fishtailing as our tires kissed concrete at the visitor center parking lot. It truly felt like a miracle that we had spent an entire week gallivanting across Arizona and Utah and still had all three of our free AAA tows at our disposal.