Navajo Food for Dinner

Goulding's Lodge is sort of its own little community, being one of the only two hotels in the Valley. In addition to traditional amenities like a pool and fitness room, it also has its own restaurant, gas station, car wash, convenience store and movie theater (to screen John Wayne movies, of course!).

You would expect the restaurant to be a price-gouging disaster, but we were pleasantly surprised by both the quality and prices there. On our second night, I sampled a Southwestern-style pork & green chile stew, accompanied by Navajo flat bread. It's a massive fried thing -- kind of like youtiao, the fried bread sticks Chinese people eat at breakfast, if you're familiar with that -- and served with a bottle of honey.

NEW Feature! 360 Video: Monument Valley

For something a little different, I took this panoramic video from John Ford Point, to give you a better idea of how grand Monument Valley is:

Lunch in the Desert

For lunch, our guide killed this horse, tore the flesh off its bones with his bare hands and cooked it over an open flame.


Just kidding!

We came across this horse carcass in Mystery Valley and our guide ever so thoughtfully reconstructed the skeleton for our photographing pleasure. I have pix of the leg, which still had hair on it... but I'll spare you. :)

Anyway, the lunch he did make was pretty yum -- he made a little fire in the shade of one of the arches and grilled us hamburgers. The rest of our box meal included chips, an orange and a cookie.

Scampering Up Rock Arches

We saw Monument Valley as part of a full-day tour arranged by our hotel, Goulding's Lodge. It was an off-roading fantasy come to life -- trust me, if you want to heave up and down sand dunes seeing sights you can't from the main roads, this tour is for you!

The experience as a whole gets an A+, but our laconic Navajo tour guide left a little to be desired. When I asked him how all the big mesas were formed, he paused a minute before answering, "... Nature formed them." Wonderful, thank you!

One cool thing about him, though, was that he let us climb up the many rock arches in Mystery Valley, the perhaps lesser-known part of Monument Valley we drove around in the morning. You can bet Park Services would not be allowing that kind of behavior!

Day 17: Monument Valley

We've had so many highlights on this trip -- the Menil Collection, Marfa, Carlsbad Caverns, Mesa Verde -- but Monument Valley was right up there with them.

I find it interesting that a landscape can at one and the same time feel so familiar and so alien. On the one hand, it's the very image of the Wild Wild West, as popularized by John Wayne's grandiosely romantic Westerns (nine of which were shot here), and on the other, its bizarre shapes and hues seem to hark from another planet, like Mars.

Photo of the Day

Soon I will be inundating you with some of the 800+ photos (!) I took at Monument Valley. But even after sifting through all of them, this pic from our sunset/dusk drive to our hotel in the middle of the valley is still among my faves.