Day #3 - Goodyear, AZ to Monument Valley, UT

The day started early at 7 am as we had to get ready to leave by 8:30. I was scheduled to meet an old high school friend from when I lived in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. We graduated in 1961 but I had not seen him for 55 years. He had a career in the Air Force and lived for a period of time in the Seattle area and moved to the Phoenix, AZ area to be near his grandchildren. Although we have been email friends for quite awhile, physically we had not connected. We decided to have a meet and greet for breakfast before traveling to Monument Valley at the Arizona/Utah border.

Dave looked like I remember him but how did we get so old?

Traveling North on I 17 from Phoenix, you pass a mountainside of Saguaro cacti as you ascend to 7000 feet. We stopped at an overlook that warned you of poisonous snakes and insects (scorpions). We avoided these critters and rapidly left the rest stop.

We made a brief stop for a dark beer in Flagstaff, AZ that is a quaint town at the junction of Route 66 and Interstate 40. I wish we would have had more time to explore the town. The place we had the brew hosted a jazz jam on Tuesday evenings. Too bad it wasn't Tuesday!

We drove to Monument Valley and thought we might book a room for the evening at the Navajo hotel at Monument Valley. There were completely booked even though it is October and on a Sunday. It was just as well as the rooms started at $209/night.

The guide books tell you that the entrance fee is $20/car but this is apparently no longer in effect. Instead, to drive around the monuments, you must use a guide and their vehicle. I did not inquire as to the cost/person as we had an ample view of the monument rocks from our vantage point at the visitor center.

I found later that the 1.5 hour guided tour costs $60/per person and a 3 hour tour is $90/person.

Monument Valley (Navajo: Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii, meaning valley of the rocks) is a region of the Colorado Plateaucharacterized by a cluster of vast sandstone buttes, the largest reaching 1,000 ft (300 m) above the valley floor. It is located on the Arizona–Utah border (around 36°59′N 110°6′WCoordinates: 36°59′N 110°6′W), near the Four Corners area. The valley lies within the range of the Navajo Nation Reservation and is accessible from U.S. Highway 163.

Monument Valley has been featured in many forms of media since the 1930s. Director John Ford used the location for a number of his best-known films, and thus, in the words of critic Keith Phipps, "its five square miles [13 square kilometers] have defined what decades of moviegoers think of when they imagine the American West."^[1]

Geography and geology[edit]

Location of Monument Valley in the United States.

The area is part of the Colorado Plateau. The elevation of the valley floor ranges from 5,000 to 6,000 feet (1,500 to 1,800 m) above sea level. The floor is largely siltstone of the Cutler Group, or sand derived from it, deposited by the meandering rivers that carved the valley. The valley's vivid red color comes from iron oxide exposed in the weathered siltstone. The darker, blue-gray rocks in the valley get their color from manganese oxide.

The buttes are clearly stratified, with three principal layers. The lowest layer is the Organ Rock Shale, the middle is de Chelly Sandstone, and the top layer is the Moenkopi Formation capped by Shinarump Conglomerate. The valley includes large stone structures including the famed "Eye of the Sun".

Between 1945 and 1967, the southern extent of the Monument Upwarp was mined for uranium, which occurs in scattered areas of the Shinarump Conglomerate; vanadium and copper are associated with uranium in some deposits.

The scale of these sandstone pillars is amazing. You need to see a vehicle traveling at the base to appreciate it.

I did purchase a nice necklace for Earline since her birthday in coming up on October 19th and I wanted to get her something special to remember our trip.

We drove back the way we came...South to the town of Kayenta, AZ and found a Hampton Inn for the evening. Room rate is $169/night and we were lucky they had a vacancy. There are not many motels in the area and the guide books list several but they appear to be out of business. Trivago only found one motel and did not even list the Hampton Inn. I will no longer trust that app. Even using Travelocity, there was not a complete list of motels. Clearly these apps only list things in favor for themselves and not the traveler.

We were glad to get off the road for the evening so that in the morning we can move to the East.

One point of caution. We ordered a Sheepherder sandwich for dinner. It sounded great on the menu but the bread was soaked in grease, the meat (tri tip) was cooked dry and was tasteless, and a tomato slide was like plastic. When the waitress asked how it was, we informed her it was inedible but we were still charged for it. Do yourself a favor and go somewhere else for dinner or suffer the consequences of a gallbladder attack. I will inform the manager in the morning but don't expect any resolution.