SPAS, TRAINS, HIKING AND ANCIENT SITES IN CO, NM, UT 2014 day 8

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September 29, 2014

Breakfast at the Valley of the Gods was lovely, served in their spacious homestyle kitchen. Claire thoughtfully served some blueberry gluten free muffins for me and we all enjoyed scrambled eggs and bacon, potato cake and tomatoes with juice and good strong coffee.

Claire’s husband Gary was formerly at National Park Ranger and has a wealth of knowledge of the natural area surrounding this region. He gave us excellent ideas for further explorations as well as important timing schedules for the best photography.

If we plan a trip anywhere near this area again we will be sure to book at night or two at this jewel in the Utah desert.

We took our time leaving our Valley of the Gods B&B, wanting to absorb all the wonderful details we could, but an adventure lay ahead: the Moki Dugway! I had seen videos and read stories about the legendary Moki Dugway, a shockingly beautiful switchback unpaved road that winds its way up 1200 feet above the valley floor. It is difficult to drive this road, not so much because of the precarious turns on this steep and very narrow winding road with no guard rails, but because the expansive view of the whole of the Valley of the Gods begs you to take your eyes off the road to take in the incredible vistas. But don’t. Keep your eyes on the road, at least one eye.

This road was constructed in the 1950s by a mining company to haul ore from Cedar Mesa to a mill near Mexican Hat. I can’t imagine running into a truck, or even seeing a huge truck try to navigate this dirt road’s tight turns and steep inclines (and what goes up must go down…). There is now a law in Utah that “recommends” a restriction on vehicles more than 28 feet in length and over 10,000 pounds not to attempt to negotiate the Moki Dugway. Whew, that makes me feel safer. Not. If you are not afraid of heights I do recommend that you carefully drive this amazing road. Once at the top another great view awaits down another long dirt road, but this road travels more safely on top of the mesa.

We drove to Muley Point Overlook after having had a picnic lunch at the Natural Bridges Monument and although it had been cold and rainy at Natural Bridges Monument, the sun came out in the afternoon and left us with perfect weather for exploring Muley Point. This is a one-destination road off of the paved Rt 261 near the Valley of the Gods at the top of the Moki Dugway. We drove a rental SUV over this gravel/dirt road on a clear, dry day and had no problems getting to the point, although I will say it is a bit bumpy and rocky but this IS a dirt road. Most of the road was graded but there is a very short bit of road that is quite rocky. If you go slow, any car can make it on a dry day. It took us around 45 minutes to drive out and back including time to photograph and embrace the canyon view. You could bring a picnic lunch there and probably have the whole place to yourself! The canyon is recessed and you won’t even see hints of the spectacular along the way, all you will see is high desert scrub (a different kind of beautiful-wild). Not until you get to the end and walk over the rocks to the rim will you see the amazing canyon views with the famous Monument Valley in the distance. Go into the wild!



Monument Valley is truly an iconic symbol of the American West. This 130 acre site that crosses the borders of Utah and Arizona has been featured in so many of the cowboy movies that we grew up with from beginning with John Ford’s Stagecoach (starring John Wayne in 1939) to Easy Rider to Back to the Future to Forrest Gump.

We had been in Monument Valley several times before this but Dave wanted to tour it again, this time in the evening light. We drove into the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park owned by the Navajo Nation, to take a sunset Navajo Spirit Tour at 5PM. We met our guide Sean at the impressive View Motel, owned by the Navajo tribe. Two open back trucks pulled up to take passengers in bench seats on the truck bed. We climbed into the second truck driven by Sean, our guide. You can drive this 17 mile Valley Drive by yourself (for a fee) but there is great wear and tear on your car (4WD is not necessary but helpful). The speed limit is 15 MPH because of the roughness of the road and you wouldn’t be able to go in some of the closed off areas where some of the Navajo live if you are on your own.

We were advised to dress warmly because after the sun sets it gets very cold in the desert (which we later found out to be true!). My first preference would have been to ride a horse through this valley but since neither Dave nor I have a good seat, the truck became the obvious choice, but still as bouncy as a horse!
Sean, a young Navajo resident, began our tour near the famous “Mittens”, the giant mitten-shaped buttes left behind by the Gods. These iconic wind shaped buttes are untouched by human hands and stand out as monuments of the desert, a place where, except for wind erosion, time stands still. This wide open landscape with its crumbling formations that rise hundreds of feet in the air is desolate and yet so familiar. There is a parking area right in front of the East and West Mitten Butttes and Merrick Butte. This is the only area that really spoke of tourism and a commercial blot on the otherwise undisturbed desert valley. Many tables of Native American jewelry and other artifacts are set up by Navajo residents for tourists. Because we arrived late in the day, a good number of people were already beginning to dismantle their stalls.

After being given adequate time to photograph these iconic buttes we piled back onto the truck and road into the more desolate areas of the park. We saw tall spires like the Three Sisters, Yei Bi Chei and Totem Pole, as well as other recognizable formations like Camel Butte, Elephant Butte, the Rain God Mesa and the view of the Horsemen from the North Window. I found that looking at these and other rock formations was like finding shapes in the clouds. The more I looked, the more shapes appeared to me, like one that reminded me of an Egyptian Pharaoh.

Our truck pulled into the “John Wayne Spirit site”, another “tourist-like area” where minimal goods are sold. This is where you can have your photo taken on or off a horse with recognizable sites from movies made in Monument Valley in the background. It is from this location that affords one of the most expansive views of the more recognizable locations on the valley floor.
Sean got off the truck at most of the sites, explaining in detail the history of the ancients, the sacred places and the life of his people today. We all stood silently listening while Sean played a melancholy Navajo tune on his two-pronged wooden flute at the Big Hogan Arch, a site used in many movies. After Sean’s flute stopped echoing in the canyon we took the time to listen to the quiet of the desert valley. Nearby we stood under the “Sun’s Eye” a whole etched into a towering cavern that revealed the sky.

Well off the beaten path we stopped at a hogan in a small Navajo “village” to learn more about Dineh (Navajo) culture. Fencing with antlers and rope attached and wooden corrals suggested a community of hunters eking out a life in the extreme weather conditions in the desert. Throughout our tour I did see a few straggling cows but without much water or grass in this, to my observation, inhospitable region, it seemed an amazing challenge to survive against these extreme environmental elements. The Navajo are not nomadic as other tribes are, which makes living in this same area for centuries all the more challenging.

In this more remote area of the valley we were given the opportunity to go inside a one room home, an example of an adobe hogan, a typical home that Navajo people lived in. Inside a Navajo woman dressed in native costume showed us how the Navajo weave rugs. Our weaver told us about the legend of the Spider Woman, a Spirit Being who taught the Navajo that each blanket must be woven with a pathway in the border to keep the weaver’s spirit from being imprisoned in the beauty of the blanket. She offered to sell us baskets and other Navajo crafts while we were there. Donations for her talk were strongly requested.

As the sun set we our truck drove up to Artist’s Point and John Ford’s Point where the sun cast spectacular shadows and lit up the sky with an orange glow that illuminated the mesas and buttes in the distance. The whole area took on an ethereal aspect that with any imagination could take you into another world entirely. The mesas, pinnacles and buttes fairly glowed in the early evening light. Even though I was shaking with the now colder temperatures I was reluctant to leave this magical place. It was truly an opportunity to really delve into the mystical world of the Dineh. Hagoonee! (Happy Trails!)

Because we could not stay another night at the Valley of the Gods B&B, and everything else around had been booked even many months before, I had booked a room at the San Juan Inn, in Mexican Hat, Utah for our last night in Utah. Also because our night tour of Monument Valley would end so late and we didn’t want to drive in the dark to Bluff! Our room was very basic, old motel style and upon entering the room we found it had a very unpleasant smell that permeated everything. The room was not very clean, the bathroom extremely tiny and the bed lumpy. The walls were paper thin, with noise from adjacent rooms. Truck noises from outside entered the room as well, and not just in the morning. We even heard noise from the traffic across the San Juan River that ran alongside this motel. The motel faces the river and we chose a room upstairs to avoid noises from people above us as well as a view of the river but since it was dark when we arrived and we needed to leave early for our drive to Colorado in the morning, the “view” of the muddy San Juan River did not factor in with our room “benefits”. The room was expensive for what we got but there are few options near Monument Valley and most sell out quickly, so unless you plan to drive a good distance, you are stuck with poor or exceedingly expensive options, if you can even get a reservation.

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