From Colorado back into Utah, back to the beautiful red rock. We of course visited Four Corners, where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet. It was a little disenchanting to find that the original surveyors of the area made a mistake and the monument for the four corners is off about 7 miles….
I’m still amazed at how the land can be so flat and then all of a sudden there is a huge strangely shaped rock that seems to come from nowhere.
We arrived in the area of our campground to find EVERYTHING named Goulding. Goulding grocery, Goulding Lodge, Goulding Museum, Goulding Gas, Goulding Tours, Goulding Campground. Come to find out Harry Goulding and his wife, Leone, first came to Monument Vallley in the early 1920s. They settled on a hilltop at the foot of a towering mesa, in a tent. They eventually built themselves a house. By 1928, they had constructed a trading post where they conducted business with local Navajo Indians. The Navajos would bring the Gouldings silver jewelry and hand-woven rugs in trade for food and supplies.
Monument Valley suffered greatly during the Depression, so in 1938, a desperate attempt to bring financial relief, Harry and his wife went to Hollywood, California, in search of a solution. They managed to convince Director John Ford that Monument Valley would be the perfect location for his next film, Stagecoach. Today, Monument Valley is still used as a location for movies, commercials, TV shows and magazine shoots. Eventually they built a small hotel which was named the 8th prettiest hotel, not because the rooms, but because of the beautiful scenery around. 
We had a great “truck tour” led by a Navajo, who shared his memories of being raised by his grandparents. 
Our first stop was to show us the “hogan” (mud hut). The smaller hut was used for cleansing. They would put hot rocks inside and make like a sauna, then they would drink herbs and go in the hut to sit & sweat out the herbal drink, which would cleanse their body.
The larger hut was used to live in. There is a wood burning stove in the center and the smoke would go out through the hole in the roof. Our guide said that when he was a boy, the winters were much colder and the fire kept them quite warm. If it snowed at night, they had a little difficulty opening their front door because it would snow half way up the door. The door to the huts were always built to face East for ritual purposes. Every morning he remembered his grandparents praying to the sunrise. The Hogan below is about 100 years old.
Monument Valley is a Navajo Tribal Park comprised of 30,000 acres, established in 1958. It is located on the Utah/Arizona border within the 16 million acre Navajo Reservation. They average 8 inches of rain per year and wouldn’t you know it, while we were there, it rained a few times. It apparently doesn’t rain as much as it used to because the Juniper trees that are very, very old no longer produce the berries that they once did.
Before human existence, Monument Valley was a vast lowland basin. For hundreds of millions of years layer upn layer of eroded sediment from the early Rocky Mountains was deposited in the basin and cemented into rock-mainly sandstone and limestone. Then a slow, gentle uplift created by constant pressure from below the surface elevated the horizontal strata, which now turned it into a plateau of solid rock 1000 feet high. The natural forces of wind and rain and temperature have spent the last 50 million years cutting and peeling away the surface of this plateau, creating these natural wonders that today stand between 400 and 1200 feet tall.
The thumb
(or was it the toe?)The totem pole
The W
This was the view from our campground.
We ended our day with a great sausage, green pepper and onion dinner. 
Everyone took turns telling their funniest RV story and boy did they have some stories to tell!
No comments:
Post a Comment