Thursday, June 17, 2010

Monument Valley and Flaming House

10:09 PM | Posted by Cheryl | Edit Post



John Wayne and Henry Fonda are just a couple of the movie stars who helped make the monuments of Monument Valley famous the world over. When we visited today, there were indeed visitors there from all over the world. The Navajo Nation owns the land the monuments are on, and they run the show. So we paid our $15 bucks, enjoyed the view from the visitor center terraces, had a nice lunch in the restaurant with a great view of the monuments, and then set out to see what we could see. If you look at the picture below, there's a little road snaking through the landscape. You may drive this road at your own risk, or you may take a jeep tour (which had been recommended to us). At $60 person, we decided to skip the jeep tour and risk our car's suspension for a closer view of . . . The Big Rocks.


The road to the monuments unpaved - and that is an understatement. We barely made it a quarter of a mile when we got tired of looking in our rearview mirror for the pieces we were sure were falling off of our car. The clincher was when an entire group of jeepers turned as one to stare at us after hearing our car make a particularly horrible 'clunk.' We limped back up the road, defeated (watching the gas gauge closely to make sure weren't leaking 16 gallons of $3.94 gasoline out on the road).


All was not lost, however, since monoliths sprout out of the ground everywhere in that area, not just on Navajo land.  Each one we looked at, one of us would inevitably say "that looks like . . ." So, I decided that monoliths are kind of like Rock Rorschachs. Some really looked as if they'd been carved by people instead of sculpted by wind and natural forces. What do you see in these?
a
b
c
(for those playing the home game: A: a dog or an alien B: people standing in an elevator? castle? C: the fat lady singing? a sphinx?) 

Monument Valley was amazing, but the highlight was definitely yet to come. We had gotten directions to a slightly off the beaten path ruin and stopped to do that hike on our way to Moab. We found the dirt road as directed, and stopped at the trail head. The trail led along a mostly dry creek bed and it was QUIET. Plenty of birds, lizards, rustlings in the bushes, and our footsteps on the sandy path. Rick's directions said to watch for a sharp bend in the creek and a large pine. And sure enough, there it was:
Flaming House Ruin
This is a completely unrestored Anasazi ruin. Several of the rooms have smoked ceilings, indicating that they were living spaces. Around the corner there was even a petroglyph of a human hand:
The best part of today's hike was the chance to explore a ruin on our own. No rangers, no ropes, no aluminum ladders left laying around by rangers or archeologists, no tour groups of 50 people. When we found the petroglyph, we weren't naive enough to think no one else had seen it before us, but we got to discover it on our own today, and it was awesome. We sat for quite a while, just listening and looking, and talking about the people who must have lived there - a luxury. This is a beautiful spot and we took more than a few pictures.



One last note: Comments now work on the blog! Problem solved.

1 comments:

Rick Schafer said...

I remember the first time my wife and I visited Monument Valley 30 years ago. I had just bought a new car for the trip out West a month before.
I also tried going down that dirt road in MV in it. Even though nothing really happened to it...I was so sure it would never be the same again. When we got back to Indiana......I traded it in on a new one again. LOL

June 18, 2010 at 9:24 AM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Blogger Template created with Artisteer.