2012/06 Western USA trip - Monument Valley |
|||||
Thursday June 14th
At this point we’d visited six parks in Utah, Zion Canyon with its Biblical towers and cliffs, quiet and pastel Cedar Breaks, Bryce Canyon’s thousands of red pillars, Arches with its giant fins and arches, and Deadhorse Point and Canyonlands with their forever views over the canyons.
We were about three hundred miles from Michael and Lauren’s wedding location in Steamboat Springs and we had two weeks before we were due there. Sandie wanted to visit Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, a good choice as they are probably the country’s most spectacular cave system, but in getting there would have to cross some very hot country. John and I wanted to visit Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly and I thought John and Edna might enjoy Tombstone and the surrounding Apache country, and those locations more or less decided the route, a loop south into Arizona, east into New Mexico, and north back to the wedding in Colorado. Then it was a case of finding parks and sights and campgrounds at the right distances to keep each day interesting.
We stopped in Moab for some supplies and then we were off south, planning to enter Arizona through Monument Valley. The first sight we saw was a big sign for the “world famous” Hole in the Rock, which sounded interesting, but I spotted the other signs for “feeding the zebras and the 2-hump camel” so I kept going. It’s just a home that was built by carving out the inside of the rock, and has now been enhanced with the usual tourist trappery. I’d guess that a lot of people confuse it with Wyoming’s Hole in the Wall, the hideout of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
We stopped for coffee in a park in Blanding and I realized that we had a strong Wi-Fi signal from the hotel next door so I set about ordering a new camera lens. I hadn’t been using the lost one much for scenery but it was the only one that could be used for the wedding. I had the new one shipped to Christina and I asked her to bring it to the wedding.
The terrain was mainly flat desert, but we’d occasionally drop down into a canyon to cross a river and we’d suddenly be surrounded by vivid red canyon walls, just for a minute or two. On the far east horizon we could see the distinctive outline of Sleeping Ute mountain. On John and Edna’s first trip we’d seen it from the other side when we visited Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado.
We had lunch with Monument Valley’s spires on the horizon. The valley isn’t much when compared to the parks we’d seen but its attraction is that it’s appeared in so many films, starting in John Ford’s day. The valley is on land that’s part of the Navajo nation. Some of the buttes are visible from the main road, and at every pull-off, where you might want to stop to take a picture, there is a Navajo stall. That’s OK as it’s their land, but it was irritating that the other pull-offs have been ploughed up so they can’t be used. These are a few of the pictures we did get.
As we crossed the border into Arizona, we followed signs for the visitor centre, only to find that it was going to cost us $20 just to find out what there was to see. The centre looked more like a giant market, so we politely refused and turned around. This caused us to miss the scenic drive, but there was no guarantee that there wouldn’t be a charge for that too. If it had simply been a charge for the drive we might have paid; it was the paying to go into a shop that turned us off.