Monument Valley -- August 2002

Monument Valley is a Navajo Nation tribal park, straddling the border of northeastern Arizona and southeastern Utah of the Colorado Plateau. It preserves the Navajo way of life and some of the most striking and recognizable landscapes of sandstone buttes, mesas and spires in the entire Southwest. The area is entirely within the Navajo Indian Reservation near the small Indian town of Goulding.

Monument Valley provides perhaps the most enduring and definitive images of the American West. The isolated red mesas and buttes surrounded by empty, sandy desert have been filmed and photographed countless times over the years for movies, adverts and holiday brochures. Because of this, the area may seem quite familiar, even on a first visit, but it is soon evident that the natural colors really are as bright and deep as those in all the pictures. The valley is not a valley in the conventional sense, but rather a wide flat, sometimes desolate landscape, interrupted by the crumbling formations rising hundreds of feet into the air, the last remnants of the sandstone layers that once covered the entire region.

My trip to Monument Valley had been planned for over a year and I had a number of shots sketched out well in advance.  The actual trip far exceeded my expectations.  Tom, my Navajo guide provided some excellent ideas for new shots and angles.   On the evening of the first day, I was waiting for sunset when a huge storm came in.  All the tourists headed for the safety of their cars and hotels, but I stuck around with another photographer in the hope that he sun might come out before sunset.  Miraculously, the rain stopped, the sun appeared from beneath the low cloud and produced a wonderful rainbow.  The view was breathtaking!  Tom told me that it was the best rainbow and the best light he'd ever seen in Monument Valley.