Canyon de Chelly/Monument Valley August 3

After a long, slow drive towing a trailer to New Mexico, Sara was finally moved in and we were free to road trip for about a week and a half. We drove across the forested highland mesas of the Navajo Reservation in and out of torrential thunderstorms. As we approached Canyon de Chelly National Monument, it was obvious the worst storm was directly overhead. When we arrived, the canyon walls shown silver from the rains and we cowered from the nearby booms of thunder. Ephemeral waterfalls plunged hundreds of feet down vertical sandstone cliffs, only to disappear in minutes. We did well with the timing as it seemed to mostly rain when we were driving in the car.

Canyon de Chelly is a peculiar National Monument in that it is owned by the Navajo, and with the exception of one trail, there is no public access to the canyon itself (without a guide). The Navajo still live in and farm the canyon. We drove to all the viewpoints, which gave enough of a sense of the canyon and its many ancestral Puebloan cliff ruins to satify me. It's a nice canyon, but I found the roads and cattle detracted from the beauty of the place and it only made me long for the wilds of Escalante. We continued on across the high plateau country towards Monument Valley, passing several interesting volcanic spires along the way.


Spider Rock at left





Monument Valley. What an enormous parking lot and visitor center! To their credit the visitor center/hotel was very tastefully designed and blends well into the rocks from below. The weather continued to shift from dark clouds to lightning to rain to rainbows, which added much drama to the geology.

Geologically, it is an interesting place to sit and ponder how these great towers and buttes came to stand isolated above a flat plain. Presumably a meandering canyon system once cut through the area, followed by long periods of wind/rain/frost erosion undermining the vertical-walled de Chelly Sandstone causing collapse and further isolation. It is clearly a very old landscape millions of years in the making!









After catching a golden sunset against dark storm clouds, we drove on through Mexican Hat and up the Moqui Dugway to Cedar Mesa where we met up with friends to camp for the night.